Blue structure

Vanna Nicolotti was born in Novara in 1929 and at a young age attended the Art High School and the Brera Academy under the guidance of Achille Funi and Mauro Reggiani, before graduating in 1957. From 1959 she was part of D’Ars Agency in Milan and was one of the founders of D’ARS, one of the oldest contemporary art magazines in Italy that has been directed by Pierre Restany since 1984. She debuted in the national art scene in 1960 with two polymaterial panels for the Musical Library of the “G. Verdi” Conservatory in Milan and collaborated in the staging of the adjacent Nuovo Museo Storico. After her first solo show in Milan in 1963, she began her research in three-dimensional art 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 began with true reliefs of carved and painted canvas, overlapping multiple layers on a metallic background (the Varied Structures). Works attributed to that “sensitive geometry” theorized by the Brazilian critic Roberto Pontual (series of Mandala and Doors), exhibited in several solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad: in Soria and Valencia, Spain in 1970 and in New York in 1973. In 1975 he presented the series of graphic works Structures of the Fourth World at the CAYC in Buenos Aires and at the Genaro Peréz Museum in Cordoba in Argentina. From 1976 he was part of the Arte/Genetica Movement founded in Lecce by Francesco Saverio Dodaro and from 1979 he participated in various Mail art operations. In 1978 he introduced the word (and in 1982 the numbers), in embossed characters arranged on the plane of the canvas understood as a page, in a series of works exhibited in two-person exhibitions with Fernanda Fedi entitled Testo a fronte (in Turin, Milan, Como, Florence, Genoa) and subsequently in Tokyo in the personal exhibition at the Ginza Gallery in 1984. Among the numerous exhibitions: IX Quadriennale di Roma (1965), Joan Miró Prize in Barcelona (1965-1973), Biennale di Bolzano (1967-1969), XI Salone di Marzo in Valencia (1970), “Peau de Lion” at the Kunsthaus in Zurich (1970), Museo d’Arte Moderna, Tokyo (1984), Biennale di Venezia, Italy pavilion in Turin, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (2011). Many of his works have been acquired by Italian and foreign museums and collections, including: Vicente Aguilera Cerni Museum, Villafames Castellon (Spain); Statford College, Danville (USA); Frank V. De Bellis Collection, State University, San Francisco (USA); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Ibiza (Spain); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Pernanbuco (Brazil); Civica galleria d’Arte Contemporaneo, Ascoli Piceno; Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporaneo, Termoli; MACC, Caltagirone; mim Museum in Motion, San Pietro in Cerro (Piacenza). Vanna Nicolotti died in Milan in 2020.