Enrico Donati: Terra Est Ars by LewAllen Galleries

Terra Est Ars ENRICO DONATI

September 13 - October 12 . 2024

Throughout a storied career spanning continents and styles, Italian-American artist Enrico Donati (1909-2008) created provocative, complex, and utterly fascinating paintings that exemplified and significantly contributed to the courageous originality of 20th-century modern art. Beloved and embraced by the famed European Surrealists and later, the New York Abstract Expressionists, Donati’s works managed to express the distinctive qualities of both powerful art movements while defying easy categorization. Working from within the heart of Modern Art across seven decades, this near-centenarian explored the materiality of the mythic and the eternal in his richly layered and textured paintings that channeled the subconscious and dared to reach toward the divine.

Though born in Milan, Italy, Donati’s eclectic interests and insatiable intellect readily carried him farther afield to Paris –and including in 1934 to Arizona and New Mexico, where he lived among Native American peoples and deeply engaged with their artifacts and cultures. The trip had a profound and long-lasting impact on his artistry. Upon the outbreak of World War II Donati permanently relocated from Paris to New York, where he met renowned Surrealist Andrè Breton and other creatives finding refuge there. Breton quickly embraced Donati for his preternatural ability to access the subconscious and express its mysteries so fluently on the canvas.

“I love the paintings of Enrico Donati as I love a night in May.” – Andrè Breton

By the end of the war, Donati was advantageously situated in New York, the center of Abstract Expressionism, where he too began to explore modes of abstraction in his practice. Donati’s artistic approach shifted significantly at this time, as oil paints were mixed with ground quartz and sand and thickly applied to create highly innovative roughly textured, archaeological surfaces into which he etched primordial symbols and glyphs evocative of the earliest mark- making. Though represented by legendary dealer Betty Parsons for years, Donati’s work stood out within her dazzling AbEx roster for its uniquely tactile, dimensional, and visceral qualities. Through a highly personal artistry that achieved varied expressions throughout his career, Donati’s intellectual preoccupations – of mortality and eternity, physic and cosmic – remained constant in his remarkable lifelong creative exploration.

“Enrico Donati is that rarity, a man of his time, whose vision is timeless…a master craftsman whose tools are the elements, and whose subject is the universe.” – NYTimes critic John Gruen

Enrico Donati’s work is in the permanent collections of over thirty major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the