Achille Pace biography

Achille Pace was an Italian artist among the protagonists of the 20th century. Born in Termoli in 1923, his artistic life began in 1943, at the age of twenty, after his family moved to Rome in 1935.
His early works are characterized by landscape painting with evident expressionist references. The turning point in his artistic career came in 1957, after a long trip to Switzerland that allowed him to discover German expressionism and the artwork of Paul Klee. However, it was not only expressionism that influenced his style, but also American Action painting, which arrived in Italy after the war.
Despite the strong attraction to Action painting, Achille Pace soon realized that pure irrational action could not construct thought.
In 1960, he embarked on a new artistic path: he began using thread and other textile materials as tools of expression, combining painting with the technique of assemblage. The thread, initially used in an informal and gestural manner, would later follow an increasingly rigorous and constructive course, defining the poetics of the thread, an approach that would dominate his artistic production for over fifty years. Achille Pace's poetics of the thread is distinguished by the use of large monochrome backgrounds - often black, gray, light blue, white, blue, red - traversed by a cotton thread that delineates and defines the space by drawing thin lines. The thread was seen by the artist as a synthesis of gesture, material, and color, re-proposed in infinite variations.
Parallel to his artistic activity, Achille Pace is dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art. In 1960, he founded the Premio Termoli, an international forum for discussion on the state of art. This award has hosted illustrious artists from the Italian scene such as Burri, Capogrossi, Vedova, Fontana, enriching the city of Termoli with an important collection of contemporary art.
In the same years, together with other artists like Frascà, Santoro, Carrino, Uncini and Biggi, he founded the Gruppo Uno, focused on the research of Informal Art. The group promoted the reconstitution of visual languages in rational terms, through proposals of geometric structures of perceptual value, while simultaneously analyzing the artist-society relationship.
Achille Pace participates in numerous significant exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1980 and 1982, the Rome Quadriennale, and international exhibitions such as Orientamenti dell’arte italiana: 1947-1989 in Moscow and Leningrad and Contemporary Italian Art at Akron University in Ohio. In 1960, Achille Pace writes a fundamental text, his poetics, an essential artwork to understand his thought, published in 1975 on the occasion of the exhibition organized at the Interart Gallery in Milan.
Achille Pace passed away on September 28, 2021, at the age of 98, leaving an unfillable void in the art world. His death aroused great sorrow, so much so that the municipal administration of Termoli remembers him as an illustrious prominent figure in the cultural scene and a point of reference for our city and for the entire Molise region. His artistic legacy, his dedication to the promotion of contemporary art, and his contribution to the development of 20th-century art are a lasting heritage that will continue to influence future generations of artists.