Achille Pace biography

Achille Pace was an Italian artist among the protagonists of the twentieth 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 first artworks are characterized by landscape painting with clear 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 a strong attraction to Action painting, Achille Pace soon realized that pure irrational action could not build thought.
In 1960, he embarked on a new artistic path: he began using thread and other textile materials as means of expression, combining painting with the assemblage technique. The thread, initially used in an informal and gestural way, would then follow an increasingly rigorous and constructive trend, 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 delimits and defines space by drawing thin lines. The thread was seen by the artist as a synthesis between gesture, material, and color, reproduced in infinite variants.
Alongside his artistic activity, Achille Pace dedicated himself to the promotion of contemporary artwork. In 1960 he founded the Termoli Prize, an international forum for discussion on the state of artwork. This prize hosted illustrious artists from the Italian scene such as Burri, Capogrossi, Vedova, Fontana, enriching the city of Termoli with an important collection of contemporary artwork.
In the same years, together with other artists such as Frascà, Santoro, Carrino, Uncini and Biggi, he founded the Gruppo Uno, focused on the research of Informal Artwork. The group promoted the rational reconstruction of visual languages, through proposals of geometric structures of perceptual value, while simultaneously analyzing the artist-society relationship.
Achille Pace participated in numerous significant exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1980 and 1982, the Rome Quadriennale, and international exhibitions such as Orientations of Italian Art: 1947-1989 in Moscow and Leningrad and Contemporary Italian Art at Akron University in Ohio. In 1960, Achille Pace wrote 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 world of artwork. His death caused great sorrow, so much so that the municipal administration of Termoli remembers him as a prominent illustrious 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 artwork, and his contribution to the development of 20th-century artwork are a lasting heritage that will continue to influence future generations of artists.