Bice Lazzari


Beatrice "Bice" Lazzari was an Italian painter.

Early life

Beatrice Lazzari was born in Venice to Lorenzo Lazzari and Francesca Rinaldo. She was the second of three sisters, the youngest of whom, Onorina, married architect Carlo Scarpa. Beatrice was educated in Venice, first at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory and then at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, where she would later be invited back as a lecturer.

The Venice Years 1924–1934

 Lazzari's first exhibition was a group show at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in 1924. In 1928 she had her first solo exhibition at Galleria Botteghe D'Arte in Venice. In 1929 she had her second solo shows at the Galleria San Moise. On both occasions, she mostly exhibited figurative paintings. In the early 1930s, Lazzari hung out at the Artistic Circle of Palazzo dei Piombi e dal Caffè on the banks of the Zattere, where she met Carlo Scarpa, Mario Deluigi and Virgilio Guidi and was inspired to steer her work towards a more rationalist approach. She made a clean break from figuration, and started working on abstract and geometric compositions.

The Rome Years 1935-1981

In 1935 Lazzari moved to Rome where, on top regularly exhibiting her paintings in gallery and museum shows, she started working on murals and decorative panels in collaboration with the architects Attilio and Ernesto Lapadula. In 1941 she married the Venetian architect Diego Rosa.
After World War Two, Lazzari focused exclusively on painting. In the 1950s she was invited to participate in the 25th Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadrennial. From the late 1950s to 1963, she worked mostly with oil to reinforce the application of other materials such as glues, sands and later acrylics. In 1964 her work took a minimalist turn, her work often consisting in graphite-drawned lines on monochrome backgrounds. Lazzari died in Rome in 1981.

Legacy

The Archive Bice Lazzari is based in Rome. It houses a significant number of her works, including paintings, poems and exhibition catalogues.
In 2018-2019 The Phillips Collection exhibited Bice Lazzari: The Poetry of Mark-Making, featuring works acquired by the Collection.  The exhibition was curated by Renato Miracco.
Lazzari's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. In 2022 the Estorick Collection of [Modern Italian Art] in London held a retrospective of her work entitled Bice Lazzari: Modernist Pioneer.
In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: [Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970] at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Lazzari's work is in the National Museum of Women in the Arts and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.