und den Lukrez im Auge hatte, als er sich gleichsetzte mit der allen Dingen gemeinsamen Natur?
Marcia Hafif (born 1929 in Pomona, CA; lives in New York and Laguna Beach, CA) is amongst the most relevant painters of our time. From 1961 to 1969 she lived in Rome and was part of the Roman art scene revolving around Turcato, Angeli, Kounellis, Fabro and the artists of Galleria La Salita. In 1971 she returned to the United States and began questioning painting in a fundamental way, creating the Inventory. Her Italian oeuvre, produced prior to this, stands unique for itself and has been honoured for the first time in an exhibition at MAMCO, Geneva, accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, in 2010.
The Inventory, begun in 1971, has long been associated with Radical Painting, attested by her participation in the eponymic exhibition curated by Thomas Krens in 1984. Through the conceptual approach of the Inventory and the defection of the other artists she turned away from that concept for a longer period of time. In the purist-genealogical approach, boundaries blur, paintings transform into objects and correlate with the exhibition space´s architecture and the viewer.
The frescos of Fra Angelico at the convent San Marco in Florence have deeply impressed her and for several years she searched for a solution to find a way to translate the achievement of the Renaissance painter into her own “language”.
The five exhibited paintings, created in 2010, are titled Splash Paintings. Their sheer size alone sets them apart from the artist´s late work. The act of painting, documented in a series of smaller paintings in the primary colours of green and orange, has never been so clearly traceable as in these works. The intensity and pure painterly quality is emphasized by the use of the secondary colours of blue and pink.
