Getulio Alviani was born in Udine in 1930. His first one-man show took place at the Mala gallery in Lublijana (in 1961) and marked the beginning of a course of visual research that has been surprising, extremely rigorous at a theoretical level and very precise in its formal developments. His tendency to rigour in the projecting of his work, which also stems from a temperamental inclination, drew him to the artistic climate that was developing in those years – marking one of the important aesthetic turning points of the ‘Sixties – the programmatic and kinetic art of which Alviani was one of the first and most lucid exponents.
His curiosity is omnivorous, systematic and orderly, forming itself on contact with the world of industry, engineering and architecture.
He observes the light as a dynamic factor and then later his research turns its attention to steel and aluminium surfaces and is formalized in the well-known “Superfici a tessitura vibratile” [surfaces in vibrating textures]: the structures – unique or multiplied as modules – mutate, thanks to the surface texture, the incidence of the light and the visual angulations. In 1967 he presented “Rilievo a riflessione ortogonale” [relief in orthogonal reflection]: a real floor of square modules of mirrored stainless steel, in which horizontal and vertical vibrations alternate; walking over a variable surface, gazing into one’s own mirror image, creates a real lack of balance and disorientation in the viewer.
Alviani’s research has always been restless and multidirectional and also arrives as far as the creation of “positive/negative” fabric, designed in 1963 for Germana Marucelli, the very first ‘op’ garments ever to be made.
The sense of his work has always lain in turning things on their heads, in inversions, opposites, antitheses, counterparts, in positives and negatives.
Alviani is an artist who has long had ties with the city of Pescara and in the ‘Seventies he worked with the galleries of Mario Pieroni and Lucrezia De Domizio. He recalls the experience like this, “[…] things are not necessarily born in the great centres where the situations are appropriate […] Mario Pieroni decided to do editions with large scale works, I made a big floor of steel and this edition was given the name ‘From the world of ideas’ [dal mondo delle idée].” In Pescara he also took part in two editions of Fuoriuso: ‘Opera prima’ and ‘Caravanserraglio’.
The exhibition on show at Vistamare concentrates both on the environmental dimension of Alviani’s work (through the construction of two sculptures that underline the alternation of positive and negative, making use, also, of the movement of the metallic material dearest and most congenial to him: aluminium) and also on the research into the technical synthesis between light and dynamism in works in more traditional formats.
Among his most important exhibitions we think back to his participation, in 1964, in ‘Nouvelles Tendences’ at the Louvres in Paris and, in 1965, in ‘The responsive eye’ at the MOMA in New York which acquired several pieces which went on to form part of the museum’s permanent collection.
In 1968 he was invited to take part in Documenta 4 in Kassel. From 1981 to 1985 he was director of the Museum of Modern Art in Cludad Bolivar, Venezuela.
He has participated several times in the Venice Biennale (1984, 1986 and 1993). In 2000 an exhibition of his graphic work was organised at the Galeria Bielska BWA in Bielsko-Biala and he has had one-man shows in Chelm (1994), Krakow (1996), Naples (1998), Düsseldorf (2000), Bologna and Piacenza (2001), to name just a few. In 2002 he took part in the Buenos Aires Biennale and in 2004 in the Milan Triennale, in the same year exhibiting at the Graz Kunsthaus and at the Palazzo delle Papesse.
In 2004 a retrospective dedicated to his work was shown at Bergamo’s Museum of modern and contemporary art.