The Procuratie Vecchie opens to the public with a major exhibition on Louise Nevelson

From April 23 to September 11, 2022, the Procuratie Vecchie in St. Mark’s Square in Venice will partially open to the public for a major exhibition dedicated to Louise Nevelson, an official collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale’s International Art Exhibition. Indeed, the Louise Nevelson Foundation is announcing a major exhibition project celebrating one of the most significant figures inAmerican abstractionism.

Louise Nevelson. Persistence, the title of the exhibition, is intended to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the artist’s participation in the 1962 Art Biennale. Curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Berkeley, University of California, and among the foremost experts on Nevelson, who will publish a monograph on the artist with Yale University Press in 2023, the exhibition at the 59th edition of the Biennale will bring together more than sixty works made between the 1950s and the 1980s, divided among nine rooms on the second floor of the Procuratie Vecchie. Famous painted sculptures will be on display here along with lesser-known examples of his collages, giving the public an understanding of the artist’s approach to abstraction and assemblage. In addition, the formal and conceptual connections between the different phases and moments of Nevelson’s work will be highlighted.

The focus of the exhibition will be large-scale sculptures in painted wood, iconic works from the artist’s output, including examples from different sculptural cycles produced in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. There will also be examples of his white sculptures, such as the multiple column installation Dawn’s Presence - Three (1975) and his rare gold-colored works, such as The Golden Pearl (1962).
The exhibition aims to emphasize the relationship between her work as a sculptor and her practice devoted to collages and wall assemblages.

Born in Perejaslav (Ukraine) in 1899, Louise Nevelson migrated to the United States with her family in 1905, settling in Maine. After moving to New York in 1920, Nevelson studied at the Art Students League. In the 1930s she was an assistant to Diego Rivera, and later an art teacher with the Works Progress Administration. She had her first solo exhibition in 1941 at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. In the early 1950s he traveled to Guatemala and Mexico to learn about pre-Columbian art. As a result of these trips, he began to create his first wood sculptures. Over the next four decades, Nevelson became one of the most revolutionary artists in the United States, becoming known for large monochromatic wood sculptures composed of multiple abstract elements, often arranged in grids of geometric compartments. Deeply linked to the achievements of Cubism and Constructivism, Nevelson’s works incorporate unexpected combinations of forms and materials. So too, the assemblages, collages and jewelry works arose in deep relationship to her sculptural work.

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Image: Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Presence - Three (1975; painted wood, 312.4 x 322.6 cm) © 2022 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Procuratie Vecchie opens to the public with a major exhibition on Louise Nevelson

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