Beatrice Lazzari was born in Venice on November 15, 1900. She initially enrolled at the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, then enrolled at Venice’s Academy of Fine Arts to study ornament and decoration. She proved to be a capable landscape painter, and her work had affinities with the Burano school of painters who, in the 1920s, continued the Venetian tradition of landscape painting with the island of Burano as their main subject. In 1924 she exhibited for the first time with a still life painting to an exhibition of works held at Opera Bevilacqua La Masa, and in 1929 had her first solo exhibition at the Galleria San Moisè.

Venice’s artistic scene in the 1930s was animated by circles of artists such as the Circolo Artistico of Palazzo dei Piombi and the Café on the Zattere, where she met Mario de Luigi and Carlo Scarpa, and started her affiliation with the avant-garde movement and rationalist research. While she looked for affirmation in naturalistic landscapes in her paintings, she completely broke with the figurative tradition in the applied arts, by choosing abstract designs and geometric compositions as her means of expression. In 1935, Lazzari moved to Rome, where she contributed by creating murals and decorative panels for the installation of large state-organized exhibitions. In the 1950s Lazzari received wide-spread recognition for the first time: in 1951 she had a solo exhibition at the Galleria La Cassapanca in Rome, followed three years later by another show at the Galleria Schneider. In 1958 she exhibited at the Galleria d’Arte del Cavallino in Venice, and again in Rome at the Galleria La Salita. In 1959 Lazzari abandoned oil painting to explore new materials, such as glue, sand, tempera and, later, acrylic.

Her interest in Art Informel, which had begun in 1957, also came to an end in 1963. in 1964 the artist started her artistic research from scratch, abandoning her usual materials and palette in order to find a more simplified means of expression, often applying lines of graphite to a monochrome background. The series of acrylics produced towards the end of the 1960s and early 1970s demonstrate the extraordinary lyricism and modernity that typify Lazzari’s work of this last phase of her artistic career, and consolidate her position as a leading protagonist of post-war Italian art. Bice Lazzari died in Rome on November 13, 1981.