Clear Light: The Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli - Tapa dura

As she once put it, although much of my work is architectural in character, I do not represent real spaces. Rather, my work has its origins in the spaces I have abandoned the mood of Rome and the landscape of Texas and the paintings are of spaces I know that look nothing like what I paintThey are essentially meditations on essences of architecture like enclosure, surface and light. Born in Italy in 1943, Lauretta Vinciarelli passed away in New York in 2011. Trained as an architect in Rome but a watercolourist by vocation, her works reside in numerous private collections and among the holdings of prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Noted for luminous qualities of colour and light, her depictions of imagined spaces open up a world of enclosed rooms, sweeping landscapes, watery materiality and atmospheric ephemerality. As a noted theorist and critic once said, they are not architecture exactly, but evidence that it exists. This book draws together work from 1981 onwards in the most complete collection of Vinciarellis work. It is supported by texts from knowledgeable commentators and presents sketch material, for the first time, that gives insight into Vinciarellis working methodology. By her colour is used as a device for shaping space and watercolour for its luminous quality and the conceptual simplicity of the act of mixing mud with water. At the same time Vinciarelli deploys a technique that is very difficult, while often operating at the very limits of her medium and sometimes even to the point of failure.