Lidy Prati (Lidia Elena Prati) was a painter, designer, and art critic known to be one of the few women that practised Concrete art in the 1940s. Prati’s Composición serial (1946-48) illustrates her interest in experimenting with the tension between geometric shapes – which usually included circles, rectangles, and squares – based on the exaltation of the surface of the pictorial space. The artist produced this tension from the intermittency of colours, sizes, and rhythms with which she perceptually organised the geometric forms on the canvas. Composición serial not only documents the influence that gestalt theory had on her work, but also a turning point in Concrete art in Argentina: a new period marked by interruption of the theoretical formula of the cut frame in favour of the recovery of the orthogonal format. In this format, Prati recognised greater possibilities to expand her research on the expressive power of painting, the autonomy of forms, and inventive values, ultimately ignoring the descriptive function of meaning.
This is the first time the work of Lidy Prati is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Nicolas Cuello
