ARTIST FOCUS: Tancredi

Left image from Pinterest & right from Tumblr & middle of me!

I absolutely adore Venice for the beautiful 14-16th century art that utterly envelopes you from every angle, every step. It is to its core, brimming with artistic heritage yet on this trip I was hell bent on seeing the works of contemporary artist, Tancredi Parmegianni in the flesh. Born in the late 20's, his abstract expressionist pieces are so wonderful and as you can see: alive with colour and pattern and have you entranced. He was an absolute favourite of Guggenheim’s and was the only artist besides Pollock whom Guggenheim placed under contract. 

So whilst I stood there absorbing Tancredi's paintings, I reminded myself to do art trips more often and look around to absorb the colours and patterns out in the big wide world. I find it hard not to tunnel vision on a project and research explicitly in interiors, but there is no better way for me to enrich my mind and feel inspired than stepping into the wider circles of creativity and appreciating the basics.

So here is Tancredi in a nutshell:

He moved to the city of mobile light and shifting waters in the early 50’s at a time when the figurative masters who had dominated Italian art was firmly out of fashion and abstraction was the style de jour. The names to know are Mondrian who believed the world could be reduced to pure forms and primary colours and the Spatialists, who wanted an art that both reached into and reflected the entire cosmos. Peggy Guggenheim brought Tancredi into her palace where he was surrounded by Pollock’s dynamic and wild abstract paintings.

Images from Archimagazine

 Tancredi’s own style evolved to illustrate his sense of the world as an intangible arc and the “point, insofar as it is the smallest space the mind can contemplate”. Over the next two years he developed his abstract, mark-making style through his looking glass of Venice. An artist who had found inspiration in the world, he was plagued with demons and torn between his desire for beauty and an awakening social conscience. In 1964, aged 37, Tancredi drowned himself in the Tiber river in Rome.

Some of the above information is taken (to remind me of the facts) from a good article, which you can read for a really good background on Tancredi: http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/img/pdf_press/295_pdf2_Press_Kit_Tancredi.pdf 

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