Pursuing the series of exhibitions dedicated to the relationship between Art and Architecture, Zuecca Projects and Artvisor present the first solo show in Venice of the artist Giuliana Balice. The exhibition “Giuliana Balice: l’ordine geometrico e la seduzione dell’architettura” (Giuliana Balice: the geometric order and the seduction of architecture), curated by Italo Tomassoni, will be hosted at Squero Castello, from 6 October to 25 November 2023. 

Coinciding with the final months of the Architecture Biennale 2023, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s sculptural production (from the late 1960s to the 2000s), highlighting her close ties with two of the fundamental elements of architecture: geometry and space.

As curator Italo Tomassoni explains: “the plastic forms of Giuliana Balice’s sculptures have a fundamental matrix: geometric order.

From the point of view of an entire creative history, her research has always dealt independently with the contiguous surfaces of the horizontal space of the sheet and the volumetric and discontinuous ones of the surrounding space, developing a process that ranges from the plastic superimpositions of horizontal planes, to the maximum spatial concentration of the works of domestic design (in methacrylate and Sicodur), to the constructive volumes that explore plasticity or that engage with architecture and the urban environment (in painted wood and various materials)”.

Giuliana Balice’s sculptures “affirm the vitality of the designed object and its connection to reality”.

Already at the end of the 1960s, Giuliana Balice’s main research objective was to move from two-dimensionality and horizontal planes to volumetric production and development in the environment, in direct confrontation with modernism and architecture. Many of the works produced in those years found their natural location en plein air; they became a kind of modern totemic monuments, perfectly integrated into the spatiality of the environment.

Without retreating, Giuliana Balice’s work entered the second millennium (2005) with works that increasingly essentialised the perception of form in space.

6 October-25 November 2023
Tuesday-Saturday, 11.00-17.00
Free entry

GIULIANA BALICE (b.1931)

Giuliana Balice has lived and worked in Milan since the 1950s. She grew up in Naples, where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts. Inspired by Russian Constructivism, Concrete Art and the De Stijl movement, Balice’s work favours geometric abstraction and minimalism. In all her work, the rigour of the design and the essentiality of the modular partitions are fundamental. The Swiss-Italian architect and father of Rationalism, Alberto Sartoris, defined Balice’s artistic practice as ‘architectural aesthetic absolutism’. Giuliana Balice’s first solo exhibition took place in the 1950s in Milan, at the Galleria Numero, curated by the critic and art historian Lara Vinca Masini. In the late 1960s she began to experiment with three-dimensionality, using industrial materials such as wood, iron, steel and acrylic. In the spirit of Constructivism, her work has also been recognised for its commitment to design in the service of social needs and industrial production. She has held several solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Gillo Dorfles, Vittorio Fagone, Gio Ponti, Lorenza Trucchi and Alberto Veca, among others, have dealt with her work.