Dora Bassi Biography
DORA BASSI (1921-2007) Friulian sculptor and painter, she was a protagonist and witness of the main movements of Italian art of the second half of the twentieth century. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence (1939) and Venice (1941-1944) and after the war he adhered to neorealism, born from the faded "Fronte Nuovo delle Arti". Subsequently he joined the “Numero” group of Fiamma Vigo which brought together exponents of abstract art in Florence. In the sixties he opened a sculpture studio in Udine and created works in terracotta, bronze, iron and steel for public and private clients. Sculpture teacher at the Brera Academy with Dino Basaldella and Giancarlo Marchese, from 1971 to 1991, in the climate of renewal of the academies, he took care of educational projects on the function of sculpture for the redevelopment of urban spaces. In Milan he collaborates with Lea Melandri's "Lapis" magazine, writes critical pieces on little-known figures in Italy, including Charlotte Salomon, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Vaaro, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jenny Holzer. She participates in the congresses of the IAWA (International women and arts) association and until 1991 presides over the DARS group of Udine (Woman Art Research Experimentation), curating international themed exhibitions in which Italian and European artists exhibit. The constant production and exhibition activity in Italy and abroad in the Seventies and Eighties recorded a turning point in the Nineties. Dora Bassi, who has drawn the expressive intensity of color from places of art, the material for her plastic forms, who has dialogued with abstraction and the conceptual, begins a solitary path, free from market rules and the interference of theories aesthetics. The new effort speaks of the author's freedom, of matter that transforms into light. In the last twenty years of activity and until his death his works achieved pictorial refinement, entering the narrative dimension of art inscribed in the perception of existence and its echoes. Dora Bassi creates pictorial cycles that draw images from memory, creating spaces in which she immerses everyday objects that evoke the anxieties of contemporaneity. The story is its motive, the material is the old oil paint, the medium is the light emanating from the canvas, light, evocative, allusive. “If the styles change in his work – writes Elena Pontiggia – his theme remains unique and coherent. His art, beyond the different physiognomies, has only one subject: life. Dora always talks about life: in its manifestations (men, nature, the relationship between the sexes, everyday life) in its feelings (love, suffering, dreams, memory) in its seasons (childhood, youth, the era of senility and the premonition of death). These things were close to her heart and these she always tried to represent.” (E. Pontiggia, Dora Bassi. A tireless research. Works from 1950 to 2006). Dora Bassi passed away in Udine on 7 August 2007. Gorizia, the city of her youth, received a donation of some works from her final period.
