Temple Rome Gallery of Art exhibition "Drawing From Nature: Bice Lazzari, 1950-1980", with the Fondazione Bice Lazzari. Sept. 16 - Sept.30, 2025.

Temple University Rome is delighted to present the exhibition Drawing From Nature: Bice Lazzari 1950-1980, to open in the Gallery of Art on Tuesday, September 16, from 6-8PM.

The exhibition is a tribute to the artist, showcasing a selection of drawings from the three most significant decades of her career. Beginning in the 1950s, the works reflect her use of delicate, gestural lines inspired by nature. In the 1960s, minimalism began to shape her practice, bringing more structured lines and defined volumes. By the 1970s, her playful use of line evolved into a focus on geometry and abstraction.

Bice Lazzari (1900 - 1981) was one of the protagonists of the twentieth century, an independent woman who was far ahead of her time. She devoted her entire life to art, succeeding in establishing herself in a field that was not considered appropriate for a woman at the time. She began to attend decoration courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice in 1916, although she preferred painting courses, which were barred to her because of the nude lessons considered unsuitable for a young lady from a good family. A forerunner of abstract, conceptual and very contemporary painting, from a young age she worked in the field of applied art, considered more suitable for a female artist, working with the most fashionable architects of the 1930s and 1940s.

Over the course of her life, Bice Lazzari produced an important body of works on canvas and paper, ranging from the figurative works of her youth to the informal experiments of the 1950s - 1960s, to the perfect geometric abstraction that she practised from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Her work is included in important private and public collections in Italy and abroad, including the Vatican Museums (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Brera Museum (Milano), Cà Pesaro (Venice), Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), The National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), among many others.

We are very grateful to our partners, the Bice Lazzari Archive, for their generous loans. The Bice Lazzari Archive, founded in 1981, has catalogued more than 3000 of the artist's works, carrying out an assiduous work of conservation and restoration and at the same time of promotion of a painter defined in the catalogue of the exhibition "Kandinsky and the Quest for Abstraction" organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection as "...a leading protagonist of Italian abstraction beginning in the 1920s". The Archive was set up with the aim of collecting and cataloguing all the artist's works, poems, letters, critical essays and the early works of applied art. In the Archive there is the direct evidence of her interests, her books, her records, together with the memories of the many friends she met, not only painters, sculptors and art critics.