The Great Beauty of Venice

Opening Exhibition

Friday, November 18 at 6:00 P.M.

The Exhibition will Run through February 5, 2017

GR gallery

255 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

Hours of Operation:  Tuesday-Saturday from noon 12:00 to 7:00 p.m.

GR Gallery, born almost forty years ago in the mid-1970s, soon focused its activities on the enhancement and promotion of the European (mostly Latin) post-war avant-garde, giving priority to those artists who have produced special and personal propulsive thrusts during the so-called Informel period, especially focused on the Spatialism movement of Venetian matrix and the artists who have gravitated to this city or made this their muse.

About a year after opening, and after thoroughly and carefully exploring many branches of Optical art, GR Gallery introduces ‘The Great Beauty of Venice,’ an exhibition that illuminates the close relationship established over the years with the history and the artistic developments of the lagoon city. Ongoing from November 18 to February 5, 2017, the exhibition, curated by art-critic and founder Giovanni Granzotto, will display thirty works of various artists. The exhibition will particularly focus on the movement of Venetian Spatialism, a style developed in the early ’50s that impressed Peggy Guggenheim and influenced her to the point of becoming the major patron. Lucio Fontana was the theoretician of the movement, which called for a thematic portrayal of the art in dialogue with science, and in dialogue with empiricism and technology. Especially the art should not be fenced off from the canvas: its border is space. He found artists in the Veneto region who gravitated to this side concept and soon newcomers’ signatures were added to the posters launched by the Movement. Art-critics as well could access the Movement, together with great artists who in 1945 had already published scripts around a new concept of space.

The protagonists of this exhibition will be precisely signatories of at least one of the posters of Spatialism: Gino Morandis (1915-1994), Riccardo Licata (1929-2014), Virgilio Guidi (1891-1984), Mario De Luigi (1901–1978), Ennio Finzi (1930), and the absolute protagonist of informal European post-war art, Emilio Vedova (1919-2006) and Carmelo Zotti (1933 -2007).

On the occasion of this event an elegant color catalog will be published by Grafiche De Bastiani, which brings together the illustrations of all the works on display. The images will be accompanied by critical essays by the curators Giovanni Granzotto and Alberto Pasini.

The opening exhibition will be held on Friday, November 18, at 6:00 P.M., with a presentation by Mr. Granzotto, and will be followed by a cocktail reception.

The show is made possible thanks to the contribution of the Euromobil Group.

The exhibition will run from November 19 to February 5, 2017, and be open Tuesday-Saturday through that period from noon 12:00 to 7:00 p.m.