Promoted and organized by ERPAC FVG - Regional Body for Cultural Heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the exhibition “Dora Bassi. Images and words” is a tribute to a research artist, witness and protagonist of 20th century art, forerunner of a profession that few women had undertaken, especially in Italy in the 1950s. Born in Feltre in 1921, after classical studies in Gorizia and on the advice of her mother, Dora Bassi enrolled in the School of Nude at the Florence Academy and then at the Venice Academy, where she graduated in 1943.

In the 1950s he joined the Friulian neo-realist group of Zigaina, Anzil, Canci Magnano, Altieri and other artists, but on his own path of work and inspiration. He manages to obtain his own space and his own autonomy by creating works immune from any emphasis. His is a full-bodied, compact painting, the compositional structure well structured, the silhouettes of his peasants are massive but ready to fall apart and explode in the informal experience of the following years. At that very moment an instinct to escape from contemporary artistic currents appeared, which would be perpetuated throughout her life, making her free from any categorization. The continuous intellectual tension leads Dora Bassi to resume her university studies in the 1960s and, in parallel, to begin her adventure with sculpture, first as a ceramist/model maker, then as a sculptor. He works a lot on the human figure, giving expressive form to the secret that every body carries with it in relation to space. It goes from small and medium size with ceramics to large size, with works in bronze and steel castings.

The works created between the end of the 1980s and the mid-1990s exhibited here tell precisely of this special relationship established with the image and the word, between figurative art and literature, a relationship translated, in recent years, into beautiful pictorial cycles such as The golden legend, which draws on the legend of Sant'Orsola and the pictorial tradition of Carpaccio.

The exhibition itinerary opens with a selection of paintings and sculptures documenting the artistic career of Dora Bassi, from the years of neorealism and the informal to the Milanese period, introducing us to the world of an artist of the twentieth century, as she liked to define herself.