^{Image courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection}

Tancredi at Peggy Guggenheim Collection

From 12 November 2016 to 13 March 2017 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents the exhibition “My Weapon Against the Atom Bomb is a Blade of Grass. Tancredi. A Retrospective”, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

 

^{Image courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection}

 

Beginning with rare youthful portraits and self-portraits, and with Tancredi’s first experiments with paintings on paper in 1950-51, the exhibition narrative moves on to document Tancredi in the early 50s, a period marked by the crucial encounter with Peggy Guggenheim, to whom he became a protégé, and who gave him studio space in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. The bond between them is documented by a number of works still today in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

 

^{Image courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection}

 

The exhibition brings back to Venice paintings donated by Peggy to major museums in the United States, masterpieces such as Springtime (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Space, Water, Nature, Sight (The Brooklyn Museum). The exhibition proceeds with a section dedicated to Tancredi’s works dating from the 60s. This was a period of crisis, and of a complete revision of his approach to painting, into which he now injected existential meaning.

 

^{Image courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection}

 

A further phase of experiment, in the final part of the exhibition, consists of the collage-paintings, made between 1962 and 1963, known as the Hometown Diaries and the Flowers 101% Painted by Me and by Others, which can be counted the major revelation of this retrospective and which are the product of exceptional creative verve and dramatic euphoria. These works mark the end of his extraordinary, brilliant and unruly career, dedicated to nature and to man. They are paintings which prelude the last year of the life of a painter who was among the most original and singular personalities in Italian art of the twentieth century.

 

^{Image courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection}

 

^{Image courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection}

 

^{Image courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection}

 

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
From November 12, 2016 to March 13, 2017

 

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