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. ...

MADRAGOA is a contemporary art gallery founded in 2016 in the homonymous neighborhood of Lisbon’s historical center. Since its beginning, the gallery has been an early supporter of a number of international young artists such as Adrián Balseca, Rodrigo Hernández, Renato Leotta, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Joanna Piotrowska, and Yuli Yamagata, whose first productions and exhibition have been produced and promoted by the gallery and often presented for the first time in Portugal. Moreover, Madragoa launched the careers of young Portuguese artists such as Sara Chang Yan, Luís Lázaro Matos, Gonçalo Preto, and Jaime Welsh, giving them visibility on the international scene. From its peripheral location in Europe, MADRAGOA’s project focuses on how to set a deep conversation with the city and its extraordinary potential, setting a dialogue between global artistic practices and local craftsmanship and ideas. The gallery always created experiences of research and production for its artists locally and promotes its program also through the participation in a number of international art fairs, gallery exchanges, and exhibition projects. MADRAGOA is currently recognized as one of the most innovative realities in the Portuguese art scene, while it succeeded to obtain visibility internationally throughout its years of its activity. At the moment, the gallery actively represents artists from Portugal, Italy, Ecuador, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Brazil and South Africa. ...