Enzo Cucchi

Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter and sculptor who was a central figure in the Transavanguardia movement of the 1980s. Working against the art world’s adoration of Conceptualism in this era, Cucchi and his contemporaries such as Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Mimmo Paladino sought to reintroduce figuration into painting and sculpture, generating a particular strain of Italian Neo-Expressionism. Cucchi’s large scale oil paintings conjure surreal, otherworldly tableaux, rendered in vivid hues. Charcoal lines add dramatic flair to his rural dreamscapes containing isolated hands, flames, livestock and tools. During this period, The New York Times described Cucchi as an artist “who waves his paintbrush like a magician’s wand”. Alongside painting, Cucchi is also an avid poet, producing novel texts and prose for many of his exhibitions. He has also continually worked outside the confines of gallery walls, producing outdoor sculptures for Brueglinger Park in Basel in 1984, a fountain for the garden of the Museo d’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato in 1988 and a fountain in the center square of his home town, Morro d'Alba. ...

Balice Hertling was founded in 2007 by Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling. Balice Hertling has hosted the debut solo shows of many artists like Camille Blatrix, Xinyi Cheng and Isabelle Cornaro—all of whom have gone on to earn widespread recognition. From 2012 to 2016, gallery founders Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling operated a project space in Manhattan. Returning to France in 2017, they relocated the main gallery to Paris’ Marais district and transformed the former Belleville location into a space for curated projects and shows by younger artists. Indeed, many artists represented by the gallery exemplify unique subcommunities of the emergent art world. This breadth of representation also translates to a breadth of medium, as the gallery represents painters as well as artists working in mixed media such as film, performance and sculptural objects. The gallery also represents artists whose careers are more established : British conceptual artist Stephen Willats, Syrian-born painter and sculptor Simone Fattal, and Italian artist Enzo Cucchi. In its programming and practices, Balice Hertling constantly works toward creating a more diverse and equitable art landscape. In this spirit, the gallery is proud to represent the Estate of Behjat Sadr, who was the first woman artist to be recognized as a modern master in Iran. As a result of the pandemic, the gallery co-founded « Palai » in the summer of 2021, a yearly exhibition hosting a small group of galleries from around the world, in historic locations in Lecce, a city in Italy's Puglia region. Palai is neither a curated exhibition nor a fair, it is thought to be a version of a residency, a collegial collaboration, where artists, galleries, and friends of the art world come together. In 2021 Balice Hertling relocated and brought closer both spaces in the Marais with a new main space inaugurated by a Ser Serpas scultpure solo show, and a new showroom and project space on rue de Montmorency. ...