From 1 April to 18 September 2023, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Edmondo Bacci. The energy of light, curated by Chiara Bertola, Head of the Contemporary Art Program at the Querini Stampalia Foundation, Venice. With about eighty works, many of which have never been exhibited before, including unpublished paintings and drawings, from the Edmondo Bacci Archive, private collections and international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Museum in Palm Springs, this is the first and most comprehensive solo show dedicated to the Venetian artist Edmondo Bacci (1913-1978).

The exhibition intends to delve into the more lyrical part of Bacci's work, in the most international moment of his career, the 1950s, when, already established in the exhibition environments linked to Spatialism and among the most innovative contemporary artists on a national level, he was noticed by Peggy Guggenheim and all the novelty of her painting emerges clearly in the eyes of the critics, the generative force of color, the breaking of spatial planes and the circular rhythm of the brushstroke.

Bacci is placed within the small circle of Venetian artistic excellence, which also includes Tancredi and Emilio Vedova, who in the same years obtain international successes and recognitions, and is undoubtedly one of the few artists in the Italian scene to quickly metabolize the possibilities of a new abstraction, linking contemporary trends from Europe and the United States with a unique style and personal vision.

Following this critical path, the exhibition proposes a series of fundamental works for understanding the evolution of that language of colour-light which so impressed the American patron, as well as Alfred H. Barr Jr, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York , which he bought from the artist Avvenimento #13 R , from 1953.

The canvas, now part of the collection of the New York museum, exceptionally returns to Italy, to be exhibited to the public for the first time.