DIMITRI HADZI:                                                                                       FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Roman Years 1951-75
April 23 – May 28, 2010
Opening Reception: April 22, 6-8 PM

Danese is pleased to announce the exhibition Dimitri Hadzi: The Roman Years, 1951-1975. The opening reception will be held Thursday, April 22, 6-8 PM. 

For Dimitri Hadzi, Rome offered intellectual and professional opportunities, an environment where he could intimately explore and incorporate past cultures and aesthetic precedents within his own modernist sensibilities. As Hadzi once reflected on his time in Europe, “its hard to ignore the past…The problem is to assimilate it and then try to do something as new as possible.” Inspired by the abundance of art, architecture, mythology, and Roman dedication to classical materials and technical innovation, Hadzi developed a conceptual basis for his sculpture that was “largely synthetic…the distillation of a reverence for the past fused with a twentieth century credo in innovation and original form.”

Derived from the figure and mythic narratives, Hadzi’s sculpture references antiquity and classical artifacts – abstracted anatomical forms, columnar and other architectural elements, helmets, weaponry and body armor function as visual metaphors for ancient cultures. “I was interested in mythology, and I was interested in movement,” Hadzi remarked on his years in Rome, “I was attempting through formal methods to exaggerate sexual tension or apprehension. Suddenly I was myself in an atmosphere of freedom.” Powerfully rendered in bronze his sculptures convey raw emotion, brute strength and mass, tempered with a delicate rush of whimsy, vivacity and sensuality. 

Born in New York City on March 21, 1921, Hadzi graduated from Cooper Union in 1950 and received a Fulbright Fellowship in the same year. After studying sculpture in Greece, he moved to Rome under the GI Bill where he lived for twenty-five years. Hadzi returned to the U.S. where he taught at Harvard University for fourteen years. He continued to create sculpture until his death in 2006.

Hadzi is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Phillips Collection and the Guggenheim Museum. Receiving over twenty sculpture commissions, Hadzi’s work appears in public squares, concert halls, federal and private plazas, and universities throughout the world.

The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue, which can be found at www.danese.com. For further information please contact Carol Corey or Alexandra Woodworth at 212.223.2227.

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