- ACHILLE PACE ARTWORKS

- ACHILLE PACE ARTIST

Achille Pace was a 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 theGerman Expressionism and the work of Paul Klee. However, it was not only expressionism that influenced his style, but also theAction painting americana, arrived in Italy after the war.

Despite the strong attraction for Action painting, Achille Pace soon realizes that pure irrational action could not build 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 thread poetics, an approach that would dominate his artistic output for over fifty years. The poetics of Achille Pace's thread is distinguished by the use of broads monochrome wallpapers - often black, gray, 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, material and color, reproposed in infinite variations.

Parallel to his artistic activity, Achille Pace is dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art. In 1960 he founded the Termoli Award, an international state-of-the-art discussion forum. This award has hosted illustrious artists of the Italian scene such as Burri, Capogrossi, Vedova, Fontana, enriching the city of Termoli with an important contemporary art collection.

In the same years, together with other artists such as Frascà, Santoro, Carrino, Uncini It is Biggie, found the Group One, focused on the research of theInformal art. The group promoted the reconstitution of visual languages in rational terms, through proposals for geometric structures of perceptual value, while analyzing the artist-society relationship.

Achille Pace participates in numerous important exhibitions, including the Venice Biennial in 1980 and 1982, the Rome Quadrennial, and international exhibitions such as Orientations of Italian art: 1947-1989 the Mosca and Leningrad and Contemporary Italian Art at Akron University in Ohio. In 1960, Achille Pace wrote a fundamental text, his poetics, an essential work for understanding his thought, published in 1975 on the occasion of the exhibition organized at the Interart Gallery in Milan.

Achille Pace died 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 one prominent figure on the cultural scene It is a point of reference for our city and for the whole Molise region. His artistic legacy, his dedication to the promotion of contemporary art and his contribution to the development of 20th century art are an enduring legacy that will continue to influence future generations of artists.