Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is happy to launch an OVR on Artsy dedicated to female Ukranian-born artist Sonia Delaunay which, by the title “Reimagining the color” will be running from Sept 18th to Sept 30, 2022.
SONIA DELAUNAY
Sept 18th to Sept 30, 2022.
On Artsy
“One who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color with another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinite variety of images.” Sonia Delaunay.
Sonia Delaunay is a key artist figure of the Avant-garde movement between the two World Wars of the Twenty Century, prolonging her artistic activities also to the Post War era. Alongside her husband, the French painter Robert Delaunay and other artists, she was co-founder of the Orphism movement, a kind of non-orthodox kind of Cubism noted for stronger use of colors and movement.
Ukrainian-born, she took French citizenship, and as a living female artist, she was the first to receive a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964 and in 1975 to be named an officer of the French Legion of Honor.
Far from being faithful to Picasso’s Cubist lesson, Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s own version of Cubism was of a completely new and original conception. In their Orphism, inspired by a stronger sense of color seen as a basic component of the physical reality, this element joins with the movement, and the merging of the two can generate a new perception of reality, in which simultaneity has a pivotal role. Better known as “Simultaneous Contrast”, this practice, based on juxtaposing primary and secondary colors, imbues the works with emotional and vibrant energy.
This makes clear how Sonia and Robert found themselves easily closer to the Abstraction movement, founded by Marc and Kandinsky. In research on abstract color and a movement that is seemingly close to natural vitality and spirituality, Sonia applied herself to the development of an abstract language that could easily be transferred to crafts, expressing a truly modern vision of merging all the fields of arts and design: based on the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, and clothing, forerunning her times, her practice found to her pictorial language new territories of experimentation. She claimed that “For me, there is no gap between my painting and my so-called ‘decorative’ work. I never considered the ‘minor arts’ to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art.”
By using color in a bold, imaginative way and by applying basic geometric forms to those, Delaunay was able to suggest different depths of planes and a sense of movement in her paintings. Featured this year in Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale “Il Latte dei sogni” show, Sonia Delaunay is an artist that still deserves to find he place in the XX century’s art history.
We display in this OVR a selection of prints dating back to the early Seventies, for which Delaunay would regularly take early works of her and her husband (1910-20s) as the inspiration for her late-career works on paper. The prints that we digitally display in this OVR are similar to those that have been exhibited in her great retrospective organized by Musèe de la Ville de Paris and Tate Modern in 2015.