Riccardo Licata

(Torino, 1929 - Venezia, 2014)

Riccardo Licata was born in Turin in 1929 and died in Venice in 2014. Throughout his artistic career, he devoted himself to painting and the ancient technique of mosaic, combining his creative work with teaching: he held the chair of Mosaic at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris (from 1970) and that of Engraving Techniques in Venice. His works are housed in various national and international museums, and several of his mosaics are installed in public spaces in Italy and France. His most celebrated work is undoubtedly his "alphabets," a series of graphic-pictorial symbols assembled and composed in various ways, developed starting in the 1960s and maintained throughout his career. Our work, moreover, falls precisely within this line of research, contrasting two elaborate horizontal bands of mysterious, chromatically distinct tangles of sign.
Signed lower right. Dated lower left. This work comes with an archive copy.