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Enzo Cucchi (born 14 November 1949) is an Italian painter. A native of Morro d'Alba, province of Ancona, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with his countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Sandro Chia. The movement was at its peak during the 1980s and was part of the worldwide movement of Neo-Expressionist painters.
Cucchi's first major Retrospective was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1986 and his works are held in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art moma.org New York, the Tate tate.org.uk London and the Art Institute of Chicago. artic.edu Cucchi lives and works in Rome and Ancona.
Achille Bonito Oliva was the first to name this young generation of Italian artists of the seventies as a group: In Flash Art Magazine, no. 92–93, 1979, he used the term Transavanguardia for the first time. The official proclamation of the Transavanguardia took place at the 1980 Venice Biennial. The term was an idiom for the art of this young generation following the Avant-garde art of the sixties. These artists no longer sought to evoke discomfort in the spectator by all means and to force him to go beyond the work to grasp it fully.
The members of the Transavanguardia-group have diverse working methods. Their identity as a group is not dependent on rules or any binding language of expression, but they share a preference for motifs gathered from imaginable reality and the free use of past and present. Cucchi uses forms suggestive of the landscape, legends and traditions of his home-region. He shows nature, history and culture in a playful relationship with our technical world, using symbols like a train or an ocean-liner and employing colour in terms of idea, expansion and motion rather than for pictorial sensation. His artwork is often accompanied by poetic texts some of which have been published.
Aside from the numerous Transavanguardia- group-exhibitions, his work has been the subject of solo shows in galleries, museums and cultural sites all over the world.
Cucchi's varied interests have led him beyond the bounds of ordinary exhibitions. He has made outdoor sculptures for the Brueglinger Park in Basel in 1984, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humblebaek, Denmark in 1985, a fountain for the garden of the Museo d’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato in 1988 and the Fontana d‘Italia at York University in Toronto. And a fountain in the center square of his home town, Morro d'Alba.
He also contributed to the Lucio Amelio's contemporary art collection in the Royal Palace of Caserta. The Neapolitan gallerist, after the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, asked to the major artists of that time a work about the earthquake in order to get through that terrible experience; his work Senza titolo consists in four rusty iron panels, which symbolizes the violence of the passing of time, with a vessel in the middle, a precariousness image typical of his art.A cura di Livia Velani, Ester Coen e Angelica Tecce (2025). 9788884910660, Skira Editore. ISBN 9788884910660
Between 1992 and 1994 he collaborated with architect Mario Botta on the chapel built on Monte Tamaro near Lugano, Switzerland, where Cucchi assisted with designing the interior of the chapel, mainly the main altar and the executed murals for the apse and nave. Cucchi enjoys close relationships with poets and writers like Paolo Volponi, Goffredo Parise, Giovanni Testori, Ruggero Guarini, Alberto Boatto and Paul Evangelisti. He has made illustrations for their books while they have written on his art. Cucchi has also been active in the field of stage design: He has designed costumes and sets for productions such as Rossini‘s and Respighi‘s La Bottega Fantastica at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro and Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, both in 1986, Giacomo Puccini‘s Tosca at the Teatro dell‘Opera in Rome, from 1990–1991, Pennisi‘s Funeral of the Moon in Gibellina, in 1991 and an adaptation of Erasmus‘ In Praise of Folly, in 1992. In 1996 he designed the curtain for the Teatro la Fenice in Senigallia and a mosaic on the sidewalk in front of La Rotonda al Mare".
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