Luce E Elica Balla Biography
The sisters Luce (1904 – 1994) and Elica Balla (1914 – 1993), daughters of the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla, lived almost secluded inside the Balla Art House in Via Oslavia in Rome (where they moved in 1929). Paradoxically, the daughters of the painter who was so passionate about modernity and the future of humanity, instead receive an archaic education, strangled by paternal love, not without praise for their work, but significantly suffocating. Giacomo Balla's eldest daughter was born with the name Lucia, which would change to Luce only with full adherence to futurism. Like Elica, he doesn't go to school and receives private lessons at home. She began sewing and embroidering at the age of fifteen and continued for the rest of her life. Most of his compositional talent in the applied arts was channeled into translating his father's designs and studies into works of applied art. She mainly deals with tapestries, carpets, inlays and embroidery starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, while her production as a painter dates back mainly to the second half of the twentieth century and after the Second World War. Elica will establish herself in a more confident and contemporary way than her sister, participating in numerous exhibitions as a futurist painter, including the XVII Venice Biennale, Thirty-three Futurist Artists at the Pesaro Gallery in Milan in 1929, and the Futurist Exhibition of Aeropainting and Scenography, also it in Pesaro, in 1931.
