ACHILLE PACE ARTWORKS

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 works are characterized by landscape painting with obvious expressionist references. The turning point in his artistic career came in 1957, after a long trip to Switzerland which allowed him to discover German Expressionism and the work 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 for Action painting, Achille Pace he soon realized that pure irrational action could not construct thought.
In 1960, he embarked on a new artistic path: he began to use thread and other textile materials as tools 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 thread is distinguished by the use of large monochrome backgrounds - often black, grey, light blue, white, blue, red - crossed by a cotton thread that delimits and defines the space by drawing thin lines. The thread was seen by the artist as a synthesis between gesture, matter and colour, re-proposed in infinite variations.
In parallel to his artistic activity, Achille Pace dedicates himself to the promotion of contemporary art. In 1960 he founded the Premio Termoli, an international forum for discussion on the state of the art. This award hosted illustrious artists on 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, founded the Gruppo Uno, focused on research into Informal Art. The group promoted the reconstitution of visual languages ​​in rational terms, through proposals of geometric structures of perceptive value, at the same time analyzing the artist-society relationship.
Achille Pace participates in numerous important exhibitions, including the Biennale of Venice in 1980 and 1982, the Quadrennial of Rome, 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 work to understand his thoughts, 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 arouses great condolences, so much so that the municipal administration of Termoli remembers him as an illustrious and prominent figure on the cultural scene and a point of reference for our city and for the entire region Molise . His artistic legacy, his dedication to the promotion of contemporary art and his contribution to the development of twentieth-century art are a lasting legacy, which will continue to influence future generations of artists.