Lia
Drei
Biography
Lia Drei was born in 1922. She was trained in her father’s studio in Rome and attended the International Artistic Association, where she met Francesco Guerrieri who later became her husband. After an informal period in 1962 she devoted herself to Gestalt and structuralist research and co-founds Gruppo 63. In the 1970s she added happenings, environmental works, concrete and visual poetry, mail-art and artists’ books to painting. In the following decade she participated in meta-painting exhibitions and in the 1990s she returned to abstract-structuralist painting. She died in 2005.
Critical text
“… In Drei’s works, sometimes there some more evident chromatic effects that due to an accentuated search for aesthetics or, on the contrary, due to an intentional, greater perceptive intensity: those are, in fact, colors that seem to constitute themselves towards a digression, a freedom of variation on the certainty of a centered formal relationship.
But these are brief flashes that later recompose themselves in the severe and demanding drafting, and almost end up constituting a more certain takeover of the experienced theme. (…) The interlocking of the geometric forms of the background with the snapping discs in fluorescent colors was thus complete, yet never static, recharging itself with each trial, with the multiple availabilities assigned to that basic grammar. From that event, fundamental in her path, Drei then extracted the shape of the triangle (…) The triangles became sharp blades, rays of geometric rigor, piercing a convergence that no longer establishes a spatial perceptual relationship between the work and the viewer but is pinpointed within the painting through a process of retreating the point of view, with which we come to attempt, in the span of Drei’s work, the entire path of spatial vicissitudes: from the extraction of them to the focalization of the point of view, thorougly conducted.”
_Sandra Orienti
