Enzo Cucchi

Enzo Cucchi - Restorer, painter, poet and surveyor

Enzo Cucchi was born on 14th November 1949 in Morro d'Alba in the Italian province of Ancona. His childhood was unsettled growing up in the city, alternating between different relatives, and he left school as a teenager in 1965 and worked for a while as an assistant to a picture and book restorer in Florence. During this time, he discovered his passion for art and taught himself classical painting techniques. His first successes came quickly and even as a young artist Cucchi received prizes and awards. However, his keen interest in painting did not last and he turned with renewed enthusiasm to the emerging neo-avant-garde poetry. His success in this field was very limited, however, and Cucchi thus had to earn his living as a surveyor from 1966 to 1968.

Move to Rome; friendship with Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente

When Enzo Cucchi moved to Rome in the mid-1970s, he also found his way back to painting. He was also encouraged in this by his first meeting with kindred spirits Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, with whom he shared a poetry-driven understanding of art. Several joint exhibitions followed, at which Cucchi mainly presented works of mixed media in oil on a large format. He had his first solo exhibition in Milan, and together with his friends Chia and Clemente as well as Mimmo Paladino and Nicola De Maria, he quickly became a driving force of the Italian Transavantgarde. This movement reached its peak in the 1980s and became part of an even larger international movement of Neo-Expressionists all over the world.

Classic style with much emotion and archaic motifs

With his traditional painting style and archaic visual language, Enzo Cucchi embodied a dramatic contrast to the prevailing, sober and coldly structured Post-Minimalism. Art critics such as the Biennale director Achille Bonito Oliva therefore celebrated him as a representative of a new style that clearly pointed beyond avant-gardism. It was also Oliva who invited Cucchi to Aperto 80 in Venice as Chairman of the 39th Biennale Curatorship. However, these successes did not satisfy Cucchi, but served rather as an incentive for further experiments, with which he repeatedly reinvented his painting style on a large scale. Sometimes his dimensions became narrower, sometimes he worked with incunabula and the iconography of old writings.

Experiments with sculptures and work for the theatre

Firmly rooted in Expressionism, but also inspired by modern artists such as Joseph Beuys, in 1982 Enzo Cucchi turned to sculpture. He created numerous small sculptures, but the artist did not forget about painting. Perhaps one of his greatest creative ideas was the inclusion of neon light in his more recent paintings. The theatre offered him an additional field of activity, for which he designed numerous stage sets, including for the opera festival in Pesaro and the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, and he also enjoyed a close and fruitful collaboration with the architect and furniture designer Ettore Sottsass.

Enzo Cucchi lives and works today in Rome and Ancona.