Ida Barbarigo Italian, 1925-1918

Born in Venice in 1920 into an artistic family, Barbarigo was immersed in art from an early age. Studying under her father, the painter Guido Cadorin, at the Academy of Fine Arts, from 1952 on, she divided her life between Paris and Venice – a change that would significantly shape her painting. Influenced as much by Early Renaissance painters, such as Giotto, Cimabue and Cavallini, as by the works of Mondrian and de Chirico that she encountered in Paris, Barbarigo’s painting encompassed a broad range of styles, subjects and techniques. 

 

Following an initial period of figuration, in the 1950s and 60s her work took on an abstract expressionist language, recording the sensations of place and the fleeting essence of visual experience. Alive to the atmosphere of urban life, Barbarigo found her subjects in the cafes and squares of Venice and Paris, and on walks when she sketched and notated what she saw. Many of these abstract paintings bear the title ‘Passegiata’ or ‘promenade’ or else employ an evocative excerpt of speech, denoting the paintings response to a moment in time. In the calligraphic ‘Seggiole’ series, which the artist painted for more than a decade, the skeletal outlines of café chairs are iterated and overlaid across the canvas, in colourful, sinuous line. Indelibly associated with the human form, their linear tracery summons contrasting evocations – of gathering and isolation, movement and stasis and life as much as its absence. 

During the late 1970s and 80s, Barbarigo’s paintings became figurative and their style more gesturally expressive, executed with a vaporous handling of neutral-toned paint in the Erme (Herms) series or with saturnine palettes and increasing tactility in Persecutori (Persecutors) and the portraits of President Mitterrand. Semi-obscured by dragged, poured or stippled paint, in these paintings, figures appear spectral-like, as titanium white apparitions trapped within a gestural haze. The psychological tension of Barbarigo’s mark making culminates in a series of monochrome self-portraits and paintings focusing on Graeco-Roman mythology, such as Sfingi (Sphinxes); Demoni (Demons); Saturni (Saturns) and Dionisi (Dionysus’). Pushing the human form to the edge of emotional and formal collapse, in these works, subjects appear fraught with the weight of existence. By contrast, in one of the artist’s last series, Terrestri, (Terrestrials), figures proliferate with a dynamic energy into frieze-like imagery, with teeming, simplified characters, who jostle and gesticulate within the confines of the frame. 

 

Ida Cadorin Barbarigo died in Venice in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at Museo Eremitani, Padua (2025); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2023); Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (2016); IVAM Museum of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain (2004); Museo Civico di Palazzo, Mantua, Italy (2002); Biennale di Venezia (1942, 1995, 1975 and 1978); Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (1975) touring to Museum of Modern Art, Linz, Austria and Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris (1972); Nuremberg Kunsthalle, Germany (1968); Museum of Modern Art, Rijeka, Croatia (1960) travelling to Modern Art Museum, Ljubljana, Slovenia and Modern Art Museum, Zagreb, Croatia (1960)