Enzo Cucchi biography

Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter, sculptor, and artist. He was born in Morro d'Alba on November 14, 1949. Self-taught, he began his career in the conceptual field before moving to figuration, becoming one of the main exponents of the Italian Transavantgarde.
For Enzo Cucchi, painting and sculpture are indispensable tools for expressing one's inner self. His subjects belong to a poetic universe that references popular culture and the unconscious. In his works on canvas, often accompanied by drawings or poems written by the artist himself, the images revisit with a visionary gaze the subjects of myth, art history, and literature, creating compositions of great symbolic intensity, where the world is often depicted as a battlefield between two opposing principles. His style is characterized by an undisciplined use of colors, first thickened, then stretched, and finally hinted at, and by experimentation with various artistic techniques, from painting to ceramics, to mosaic, to bronze.
He began exhibiting at numerous Italian galleries, 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 featured alongside other exponents of the Transavanguardia, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, and Mimmo Paladino, in numerous group exhibitions at international museums, from the Kunsthalle in Basel in 1980 to the Guggenheim Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1982, the Tate Gallery in London in 1983, the Museum Würth in Künzelsau in Germany in 1998, as well as in the most important national and international exhibitions such as the XXXIX Biennale in Venice and the XI Biennale in Paris in 1980, Westkunst in Cologne in 1981, the IV Biennale in Sydney, 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 in Tel Aviv, the monumental ceramic for the Ala Mazzoniana of the Termini Station in Rome, the two ceramic works for the Stazione Salvador Rosa, designed by Mendini, in the Naples metro, and the mosaic for the audience hall of the new Palazzo di Giustizia in Pescara.
His works are found in the major museum collections of the world and in the most prestigious national and international private collections.