The exhibition opens with paintings, drawings and etchings from the 1930s, including portraits of Rothko and another close friend Milton Avery, as well as allusions to an important sojourn in Arizona in 1937-38. Next comes a numerous selection, for the first time in Italy, of the first cohesive series of Gottlieb‟s paintings, the Pictographs, begun in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor and America‟s entry to World War II. These place Gottlieb, alongside Rothko and a few others such as Arshile Gorky and Pollock, among the pioneers of the new American avant-garde. Typically a grid segments the picture surface; inside its compartments Gottlieb placed symbols, whether a hand, an eye, or hieroglyphs of his own invention that blend American Indian or other primitive ritual imagery with allusions to Greek mythology. They influenced a specific formal component of Abstract Expressionism, the „allover‟ composition, which disperses pictorial incident evenly across the picture surface. Having exhausted the visual possibilities of the Pictograph, Gottlieb developed novel compositional types such as the Labyrinths (beginning with Labyrinth #1, 1950, in the exhibition) and Imaginary Landscapes from 1951, such as Sea and Tide (1952, in the exhibition). In the first group the grid of the Pictographs either takes over and dominates the painting, or becomes transparent, revealing concealed brushwork in the depths of the painting. In the second the composition splits into two zones, with celestial bodies in the upper part and an imaginary, vigorously brushed „landscape‟ below. These works coincide with Gottlieb‟s growing commercial and critical success in the mid 1950s. In 1956, the lower part of the Imaginary Landscapes detached itself from the picture edges to become an independent floating form in vertical compositions known as the Bursts, Gottlieb‟s best known works. A jury headed by Italian critic and historian Giulio Carlo Argan awarded Gottlieb first prize at the 1963 São Paulo Biennial. In the 1960s, notwithstanding the emergence of Pop Art, antithesis of Abstract Expressionism, Gottlieb‟s painting was perceived as a prophetic and vital source of Minimal art. The exhibition also includes a selection of Gottlieb‟s sculptures, made from colored cardboard and presented in the company of the cosmic images that inspired them. The exhibition closes with a series of late works in which the explosive Burst contracts into more geometric and cooler discs, painted in the years prior to his death aged almost 71 in 1974.

The exhibition has been generously supported by the Regione del Veneto, by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois and by Intrapresae Collezione Guggenheim. Hangar Design Group created the graphic design for communications. Clear Channel, Radio Italia and Corriere della Sera are media partners.

The Terra Foundation for American Art is dedicated to fostering exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for national and international audiences. To further cross-cultural dialogue on American art, the foundation supports and collaborates on innovative exhibitions, research, and educational programs. Implicit in such activities is the belief that art has the potential both to distinguish cultures and to unite them.

The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue by Giunti Editore, in English and Italian, includes essays by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and by Pepe Karmel, Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Fine Arts, New York University.