20 January – 18 February 2018
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro- International Gallery of Modern Art

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In 1967 Luciano Zarotti, at the age of twenty-five, started his activity within the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa of Venice in one of the ateliers given to the young artists at Palazzo Carminati; he will work there until 1975.

In Paris, where he has lived several times in the previous years, the impact with European pop art shakes deeply his visual culture based on the Venetian figurative tradition. Since the meeting with the drawings realized by Graham Sutherland, Zarotti’s emotional rapture for the nature, the islands and the water of the lagoon is grafted into a plant symbolism that becomes a prominent element in the composition of his paintings.

Together with the discovery of David Hockney’s pools, his dives and his blues, these images stretch in a score concerted on a new perception of the space that, also thanks to the award assigned to Robert Rauschenberg at the 1964 Biennale of Art, begins to circulate also in Venice.

The large paintings made since the late 70s move towards a realism and a composition that come closer to the new Italian figuration and evoke the tensions of the period with broken constructions, scratched figures, a darker palette and that attention to the light learned from the masters of the past.

In 1987 an anthological exhibition at the Bevilacqua La Masa closes this extended artistic season, which will result in new pictorial researches.