Lovay Fine Arts proudly presents Unpredictable Expansions, Lucia di Luciano’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, showing a distinctive series she’s been creating since 2017.
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!
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.
