Bice Lazzari
Paintings

Produced in 1925, when Lazzari was twenty-four and working within Venice's rationalist art circles, this drawing on paper stands as one of the earliest surviving demonstrations of her capacity for pure linear abstraction. The title — "Abstraction of a line no. 2, drawing" — announces the subject directly: the line itself is what is being studied, not anything a line might depict. Working in pencil and coloured pastel, Lazzari treats each mark as an independent event in space rather than as a contour of something else. The drawing predates by decades the mark-making practice that would define her late career, and it shows that her fundamental orientation toward line as subject was established early.

The work belongs to the period when Lazzari was navigating the Venetian art scene and beginning her affiliation with the avant-garde circles around Carlo Scarpa and Mario Deluigi. Applied arts would occupy her for the next decade, but this drawing makes clear that her commitment to abstraction was already fully formed. The Archivio Bice Lazzari holds this and related early works on paper, which have been exhibited as part of major retrospectives since 2000.

By 1950, Lazzari had returned to painting full-time after the war and was producing the oil canvases that would be recognised as among the finest examples of Italian informalism. L-11 belongs to a series in which an alphanumeric designation replaces a descriptive title — a move toward pure taxonomy that reflects her commitment to treating the painting as an autonomous object rather than a depiction of something else. The canvas was produced in the period when she received her first sustained critical recognition: a solo exhibition at the Galleria La Cassapanca in Rome in 1951 followed this work's completion by one year.

The painting works with oil's capacity for material density — areas of paint that carry their physical presence as part of the composition. The overall structure is geometric but the surface is not mechanical: the hand is visible throughout, giving the work a warmth that purely hard-edged abstraction would foreclose. This combination of structural rigour and material humanity is what defines Lazzari's informalist period and distinguishes it from parallel European developments.

Racconto n. 2 — "Story no. 2" — belongs to Lazzari's mid-decade output, now in the permanent collection of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The title introduces narrative as a category that the painting immediately frustrates: there is no story in the conventional sense, but there is sequence, repetition, and the structural sense that one element follows from another according to an internal logic. The canvas was exhibited during the period when Lazzari was participating in the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadriennale — the institutions that, through the 1950s, constituted her primary peer context.

The painting demonstrates the expressive, gestural character of Lazzari's 1950s work at its most developed: thick areas of oil that record the movement of her hand across the surface, organised into zones that hold chromatic relationships with precision even as their edges remain fluid. The Phillips Collection acquired this work in 2018 as part of the gift from the Archivio Bice Lazzari and the Embassy of Italy, establishing her in a major American museum collection for the first time.

Painted in the year Lazzari underwent her decisive stylistic crisis, Indicazione — "Indication" — belongs to the transitional body of work produced as she abandoned oils and began working with new materials: tempera, glue, sand, and eventually acrylic. The title performs the work's function: this is a painting that points toward something, that indicates a direction, without yet fully inhabiting the simplified language that would define the next seventeen years of her output. It is a painting aware of its own threshold position.

The shift of 1964 was not purely voluntary — oil paint was damaging Lazzari's eyes, and she was forced to retrain with materials that required less contact. What began as a constraint became a liberation: acrylics required a different surface approach, and the resulting hard-edge, minimal style proved more resonant than anything she had produced in the dense informalist period. Indicazione stands at the hinge of this transformation, carrying the material history of the earlier work while pointing unmistakably toward the minimalist practice ahead.

The Misure ("Measures") series, begun in the mid-1960s, constitutes the clearest statement of Lazzari's mature pictorial philosophy. The title names what the paintings do: they measure space, interval, and the weight of a mark against the ground. Misure n. 31, painted in 1966, shows the series in full development — horizontal bands of hand-drawn lines across a monochrome ground, each line slightly different from the one above it, the intervals between them generating a rhythm that is perceptible rather than calculated. The comparison to musical notation is not metaphorical: Lazzari's conservatory training means she knew exactly what it means for marks to produce duration and silence simultaneously.

The work sits in relation to the American minimalists of the same decade — Donald Judd, Agnes Martin — while operating entirely independently of that transatlantic context. Lazzari had little access to developments in American abstract painting during the decades of Fascist isolation, and her mark-making practice developed from her own pictorial logic rather than from influence. This independence gives the Misure series a character that is simultaneously parallel to and distinct from its closest international analogues.

One of the final canvases Lazzari completed before her death in 1981, Acrilico K belongs to the series of single-letter acrylic works from the late 1970s that represent the most reduced expression of her mature language. By this period she was nearly blind, working with the largest possible marks that her remaining vision could track. The paradox is that constraint produced expansion: the lines grew larger, the spaces between them opened further, and the compositions achieved a monumental quality that the smaller-scale Misure works had not required. Each mark now carries the full weight of the picture rather than contributing to a rhythm of many equal units.

The acrylic series of Lazzari's final years has been the focus of the most significant posthumous exhibition activity, including the Palazzo Citterio retrospective in Milan in 2025 and the Centre Pompidou's Women in Abstraction survey of 2021. These works confirm that the reduction of means in her last decade was not diminishment but the final logic of a career-long commitment to doing more with less. Acrilico K is among the most complete statements of that commitment.