Enzo Cucchi

Biography

Enzo Cucchi born in Morro D'Alba (An) in 1949. Very young he's been part of Transavanguardia, a neoespressionistic paint current.
In 1994 he developed the iconic system of the Santa Maria degli Angeli church, on the Tamaro Mount, Lugano.

Considered the most visionary artist among exponents of the Transavanguardia, in the 1980s Enzo Cucchi became internationally renowned. In the late 1970s, he moved to Rome and temporarily abandoned poetry to devote himself almost exclusively to the visual arts. Here Cucchi made contact with the artists Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, with whom he established dialectical and intellectual exchanges.

Cucchi sees painting as a means of bringing together a number of forms, concepts, and materials, using the invasive expression of gesture, through which the canvas becomes a receptacle of images and thoughts, the vehicles of a discourse frayed into a thousand suspensions. The presence of disparate symbols, of a classical or dreamlike matrix, torn from the present or memory, overlap and interrelate in the chromatic fabric from which they appear to emerge. The loss of spatial-temporal coordinates and the continuous incursion into a cultural territory and that of the emotions coincides with an unruly use of colours thickened and then streaked, violent and then sketchy and with a wide range of artistic techniques, such as painting, ceramics, mosaic, and bronze. His interest in the interaction between different arts and disciplines has led him to work in diverse fields (from the visual arts to architecture, design and fashion), and to grasp the importance and fertility of these encounters. Intuitions such as these gave rise to his collaborations with Alessandro Mendini and Ettore Sottsass in the conception of publishing projects (I Disuguali, Cucchi and Sottsass's project for the periodical issue of ceramic panels), the production of four-handed works, and shared exhibitions.

In recent years, he has specifically designed permanent works for different cities: the mosaic for the Museum of Art in Tel Aviv; the monumental ceramic for the Ala Mazzoniana of Termini Station in Rome; the two ceramic works for the Stazione Salvator Rosa designed by Mendini in the Naples subway; and the mosaic for the audience chamber of the new Palazzo di Giustizia in Pescara.

The Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli in the Tamaro Mount, and The Church of San Giacomo Apostolo in Ferrara.

He designed “Ideal Fountains”, once is placed in Toronto, one in the Louisiana Museum in københavn, one in Catanzaro and a new one is now installed in Ancona. These works show that the relevance of a language based on a short circuit between the narrative force of the sign and the formal seduction of matter can relate to the complexity of urban space and the individual cultural contexts it communicates with.

Enzo Cucchi has presented numerous solo exhibitions and taken part in collective shows in the most important Italian and foreign museums, such as the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Castello di Rivoli, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo, the Academy of France in Rome–Villa Medici, and the Musée d'art moderne of Saint-Étienne Métropole. He has also participated in the most important contemporary art exhibitions internationally, including the Venice Biennial, documenta in Kassel, and the Quadriennale d'Arte in Rome. His works are in the world's major museum collections and the most prestigious private collections.


Solo Shows:

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982