Ida Barbarigo, Unity in Depth

Ida Barbarigo was born in Venice in 1920 as the daughter of an artistic and accomplished Venetian family. She gave up studying architecture in order to study painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. Many early Renaissance painters, including Giotto and Cimabue, influenced her work. She also drew inspiration from the art of early civilisations. Restlessness and curiosity led her to travel. She spent time roaming and wandering “en plein air” (in the open air), increasingly experiencing sudden revelations. In 1952, she moved to Paris.

Drawing was of great importance to her during the first years of her activity. Gradually, she formed a personal way of seeing, developing a distinctive creativity, especially in the fields of painting and engraving. After an early figurative period, Barbarigo formed a personal style with work that tends towards abstraction.

Her paintings in the late 1950s and early 1960s are particularly modern, because they display an avant-garde ability to paint the unseen, the void. As early as Fontana, Ryman and Gutai artists, Barbarigo’s work sought to capture the invisible architecture of emptiness. Her work is a logbook, consisting of a number of series, which seek not to evoke, but to invoke, the silent spirit of the present.

She explored the world around her and examined the energy of public squares and terraces. She used café and restaurant chairs in the squares of Venice and Paris as her first theme, in the series Le Seggiole (Chairs). From 1961 to 1976, she worked on this subject repeatedly in a series of oils and small watercolours. She treated the chair as a structural, compositional element, and painted the energy in between their forms.