“My work has been a continuous transformation.
Today, at 91, I get up in the morning and think about
how I can express myself better today than yesterday!”
Lucia di Luciano, 2024

For Unpredictable Expansions, Lovay Fine Arts unveils for the first time one of the most obsessive series completed by the artist – among many series from her prolific practice. On top of monochromatic backgrounds, Lucia di Luciano freely drew with a thin black ink pen. This line functioned as an abstract handwriting that allowed her to articulate her obsessions with her personal view on the history of abstraction.

Through the use of diverse drawing typologies – such as repetition, geometry, ornamentation, expressivity, scribbling, and automatic drawing – she created an idiosyncratic abstract universe. Some of the motifs she composed recall specific styles, such as optical art or expressionism, while others appear entirely otherworldly. Di Luciano culled this sedimentation of references both out of her own formal inventions and from our collective visual environment.

These organic constellations reveal her rich emotional and poetic mind, while being traces of a broader history of art.

From her rigorous 1960s Arte Programmata abstractions, through her shattering of the modernist grid (Lovay Fine Arts, 2023), to the series featured in this exhibition, Di Luciano has clearly established herself as an important figure in the recent history of painting.

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Lucia di Luciano is an Italian artist born in 1933 in Siracusa, Sicily, now living in Rome. She was,together with her husband Giovanni Pizzo (1934-2022), a key figure of the Arte Programmata in the 1960’s, an Italian avant-garde art movement, that aimed to redefine the relationship between artists, their work and the viewer. It pioneered a form of early computer art, basing the  compositions on mathematical formulas to produce algorithmically generated paintings. Since the mid 1970’s, di Luciano has relentlessly continued to experiment and seek formal inventions. Despite her artistic contributions, Di Luciano has not been widely exhibited and has stayed away from the artworld spotlight. After a long hiatus, now in her 90s, Di Luciano returns to the international art scene. The artist has recently begun showing her historic work, participating in Cecilia Alemani’s 59thVenice Biennale in 2022, and with a first small showing of her contemporary practice at Lovay Fine Arts, Geneva in November 2023. This coming fall, her work will be included in the group exhibition Electric Dreams at Tate Modern, London.

Lucia di Luciano