Enzo Cucchi biography

Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter, sculptor and artist. Born in Morro d'Alba on 14 November 1949. Self-taught, he took his first steps in the conceptual field until arriving at figuration, becoming one of the main exponents of the Italian Transavantgarde.For Enzo Cucchi, painting and sculpture are indispensable tools for expressing one's interiority. His subjects belong to a poetic universe that refers to popular culture and the unconscious. In the works on canvas, often accompanied by drawings or poems written by the artist himself, the images reproduce with a visionary gaze the subjects of myth, art history and literature, giving life to compositions of great symbolic intensity, in which the world it is often represented as a battlefield between two opposing principles. His style is characterized by an undisciplined use of colours, first thickened, then stretched and finally hinted at, and by an experimentation with various artistic techniques, from painting to ceramics, mosaic and bronze.
He began to exhibit in numerous galleries Italian companies including the Emilio Mazzoli gallery in Modena in 1979 and the Gian Enzo Sperone galleries in Rome and New York from 1981 to 1985. He is also present together with the other exponents of Transavantgarde, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino, in numerous group exhibitions at international museums, from the Kunsthalle of Basel in 1980 to the Guggenheim Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1982, at the Tate Gallery in London in 1983, at the Museum Würth in Künzelsau in Germany in 1998, as well as in the most important national and international events such as the XXXIX Biennale of Venice and the XI Biennale of Paris in 1980, Westkunst in Cologne in 1981, the IV Biennale of Sidney, Documenta 7 in Kassel and Zeitgeist in Berlin in 1982.
In recent years, the artist has created four permanent works for four different cities: the mosaic for the Museum of Art of Tel Aviv, the monumental ceramic for the Ala Mazzoniana of the Termini Station in Rome, the two ceramic works for the Salvador Rosa Station, designed by Mendini, in the Naples metro and the mosaic for the hearing room of the new Palazzo di Giustizia of Pescara.
His works can be found in the major museum collections in the world and in the most prestigious national and international private collections.