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Current Exhibit
This show summarizes the life work of Oskar D’Amico including early figurative pieces reminiscent of Picasso and Matisse, mixed media abstract paintings, and constructivist work in a geometric style. Drawings and photographs of his set designs are also featured.
D’Amico was born in Castelfrentano, Italy in 1923. He studied architecture and philosophy in Italy, but found his love for art surpassed his studies. In the 50’s, his murals and artwork attracted the interest of the Italian and Hollywood movie industry giving him the opportunity to work with such legends as Orson Welles and Federico Fellini. He worked on over 75 films as art director, production designer and screen writer. Most of his sets utilized his training in architecture and focused on Roman constructions and historic buildings. For his art direction, he received the coveted Italian film award comparable to our Oscars, the Marco Aurelio Award at the Rome Film Fest in 1958.
In the 1960’s, D’Amico moved to New York to attend Pratt Institute and concentrate on painting and sculpture. He arrived on the scene just after the New York School had liberated painters to totally abandon objective content in favor of expressive brushwork and the medium itself as subject. He adopted this freedom in his work and combined thick sculptural layers of paint with a cubist sensibility to create works he called, “materic”. His new focus on the abstract or “on the plane of all matter” was well received by critics and the public in New York and Philadelphia.
In the 1970’s, D’Amico returned to his architectural background constructing sculptural pieces of wood that he painted in bold, energetic colors. In 1976 when he presented his new “geometrics” at the Grand Palais de Paris, he fearfully anticipated the response knowing how “French people are hard to please in art matters”. However, the exhibit was successful for D’Amico with twelve paintings selling opening day. Throughout the decade, he continued showing in France as well as Mexico, being well received in the press in both cultures. While in France, D’Amico was introduced to the MADI movement and found a compatibility with their brightly colored, geometric forms.
The following decade, D’Amico continued showing in France but returned to New York with new canvases of flat geometric representations of a ficticious spatial plane. The critics were impressed. Claude Le Seur in Artspeak wrote, “Oskar D’Amico revives the formal vocabulary of precisionism…(his) large smoothly painted canveses are emblematic, yet their shaded forms belie the flatness of the picture plane…Working in a well-worn tradition, D’Amico arrives at a new statement.”
During the 1990’s, D’Amico aligned himself to the MADI movement, a geometric style of art begun in Argentina in 1946 by Carmelo Arden Quin. Along with helping to establish a MADI movement in the United States, he also co-founded the first MADI gallery which was located in Albuquerque, NM. With his MADI affiliation, he quickly became a favorite among international aficionados of the movement. His inclusion in MADI group shows took him back to Italy, France and into Hungary and Spain.
In 2003, Oskar D’Amico died at the age of 80, but his works keep his spirit alive. Museums across Europe including the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Gyor Museum of Hungary contain pieces by this acclaimed artist. Works from his 50 year career will be featured in this exhibit with an emphasis on the geometric pieces of his final years.
