Caterina Molteni is Curator at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. From 2016 to 2019 she was Coordinator of Public Programmes and Digital Content at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Rivoli-Turin. In 2014, she founded Tile Project Space, a non-profit space dedicated to research on Italian art. His texts have appeared in Flash Art, CURA., Nero Editions, Kabul Magazine while her recent curatorial projects include: Yvonne Rainer: Words, Dances, Films (MAMbo, 2023); The Floating Collection (with Lorenzo Balbi, MAMbo, 2022); Perchè lo faccio perchè. La vita poetica di Giulia Niccolai (with Allison Donahue, MAMbo, 2022); Dear you (MAMbo, 2021); Per un rinnovamento immaginista del mondo (with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Alba, 2019); String Figures. Narration Practices (Baruchello Foundation, Rome, 2018). For MAMbo she conceived and edited several publications including the first complete monographs dedicated to the work of Italo Zuffi (Corraini Edizioni, 2021) and Ludovica Carbotta (Edizioni MAMbo, 2024).
Abstract
One of the founders of Gruppo 63, Lia Drei is one of the lesser-known protagonists of Italian kinetic art, active in the 1960s in Rome after a degree in Literature from the Sapienza University and a period of training and teaching in New York.
If between 1962 and 1967 the artist dedicated her painting to the optical and reticular research of colour, producing some of the most emblematic works of her production, in 1968 she met the literary and poetic neo-avant-garde linked to the newly-born Gruppo 63, which had its headquarters in the capital, the magazine “Quindici”. Drei’s encounter with Adriano Spatola and Giulia Niccolai led her to ‘open’ outcomes in her work, espousing the phenomenological premises of ‘total poetry’, in which there is an ‘uncontrollable equivalence between the level of transmission and the level of listening’ (A. Spatola, 1975). The intersubjectivity and plasticity of words, which led several female artists of the time to work in the field of visual, concrete and sound poetry, was translated by Lia Drei into object-books, such as Iperipotenusa (1969) and environmental installations activated through happenings (Rieti, 1968).
The contribution intends to investigate the relationship between the artist and the literary neo-avant-garde, emphasising how specific formal choices in the expansion of the work are the result of adherence to a phenomenological vision that places the perceptive process of the spectator at the centre. Particular attention will be paid to Giulia Niccolai’s critical (and poetic) reading and curatorial activity on Drei’s work, which draws her practice into the feminist debate of the time.
Image: Lia Drei, Operazione spaziocromatica 03, 1963, olio su tela, 80 × 100 cm, Collezione Premio Termoli, MACTE, Termoli Foto: Gianluca Di Ioia
