Enzo Cucchi, Untitled, (2024).Photo: Argenis Apolinario; Courtesy of the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery. © Enzo Cucchi
A key figure in the Transavanguardia movement, Italy’s take on Neo-expressionism, Enzo Cucchi had a celebrated solo exhibition that occupied the entire rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York when he was just 36 years old, in 1986. Back in New York for his first one-person exhibition in 25 years, Cucchi brings his distinctive brand of poetic paintings and sculptures for the viewers’ contemplation. Presenting numerous small canvases with ceramic attachments wrapping around the spacious gallery walls, and featuring a few larger paintings and marble sculptures on plinths, the Rome-based artist constructs an open-ended narrative comprised of dreamlike visuals. From paintings of flowers, houses, fragmented figures, and skulls on wood and burlap to marble and ceramic sculptures of reclining forms, Cucchi combines diverse elements into symbolic—almost mythological—arrangements.