Vanna Nicolotti

Biography

Born in Novara in 1929, died in Milan in 2020. Artistic High School and Brera Academy under the guidance of Achille Funi and Mauro Reggiani. She graduated in 1957. She continued her graphics studies with Oscar Signorini. Since 1959 you have been part of D' Ars Agency in Milan and are among the founders of D' ARS, the oldest contemporary art magazine in Italy still published regularly. She made her debut in 1960 with two multi-material panels for the Music Library of the “G. Verdi” in Milan and collaborates in the construction of the adjacent New Historical Museum. After the first solo exhibition in Milan in 1963, she began three-dimensional research in the area of Lucio Fontana's new spatial reality, exhibiting the first examples in London in 1964, Milan (Galleria Pater, 1966), Lecco, Como and Rome. She then arrives at real reliefs of carved and painted canvas, superimposing several layers on a metal background (the Varied Structures). Works attributable to that "sensitive geometry" theorized by the Brazilian critic Roberto Pontual (Mandala and Doors series), exhibited in several personal exhibitions in Italy and abroad: in Soria and Valencia, Spain in 1970, in New York in 1973. It is worth mentioning the presentation, at the CAYC in Buenos Aires and at the Genaro Peréz Museum in Cordoba in Argentina, 1975, of the cycle of graphic works Structures of the Fourth World. Since 1976 you have been part of the Art / Genetics Movement founded in Lecce by Francesco Saverio Dodaro and since 1979 you have participated in various Mail art operations. In 1978 he introduced the word (and in 1982 the numbers), in relief characters arranged on the surface of the canvas intended as a page, in a series of works exhibited in two-person exhibitions with Fernanda Fedi entitled Text on the front (in Turin, Milan, Como, Florence, Genoa) and later in Tokyo, Japan in the solo exhibition at the Ginza Gallery, 1984. Among the numerous exhibitions: IX Quadrennial of Rome (1965), “Joan Mirò” prize in Barcelona (1965-1973), Biennale of Bolzano (1967 -1969), XI March Salon in Valencia (1970), “Peau de Lion” at the Kunsthaus in Zurich (1970), Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1984), Venice Biennial, Italian Pavilion in Turin, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (2011). His works have been acquired by Italian and foreign museums and collections, including: Museo Vicente Aguilera Cerni, Villafames Castellon (Spain); Statford College, Danville (USA); Frank V. De Bellis Collection, State University, San Francisco (USA); Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Ibiza (Spain); Museum of Contemporary Art, Pernanbuco (Brazil); Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ascoli Piceno; Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art, Termoli; MACC, Caltagirone; mim Museum in Motion, San Pietro in Cerro (Piacenza). He died in Milan on 5 February 2020

Vanna Nicolotti - PostSpatialism

We call Postspatialisti those artists who continue researchs on the three-dimensionality of the canvas starting from the intuition and lesson of Lucio Fontana,such as Paolo Scheggi and Vanna Nicolotti. Both artists do not use a single canvas, as Fontana did, but multiple canvases or overlapping elements where the same geometric shape is repeated in the different canvases sometimes, even staggereds. As with Fontana, the surface of the work is perfectly two-dimensional; it is the combination of multiple canvases with carved areas that gives not only physical but above all spiritual depth to the work.

Tags: postspazialisti - Lucio Fontana - Paolo Scheggi - Vanna Nicolotti