Lovay Fine Arts is delighted to present Essenzialità an exhibition of new works by Italian artist Lucia di Luciano (Syracusa, 1933). We are showing a group of never seen works on paper and paintings spanning from the 1990s to the present, with a focus on works from the last year.
Curated by Mohamed Almusibli in close collaboration with Lucia di Luciano.
The exhibition is a testament to Di Luciano’s evolution: from her disciplined historical abstractions rooted in the Arte Programmata movement to a newfound liberation that shatters the modernist grid. Breaking free from her previous rigor, Di Luciano reveals free, uninhibited patterns of colors, lines, and brushstrokes.
The works on paper are a testimony to her skills in minimalist and geometric precision. Notwithstanding, instead of being organized in mathematical patterns or sequences, shapes like squares and lines give way to organic constellations that defy all rules in a monochromatic palette.
My work has been a continuous transformation. I get up in the morning and think about how I can express myself better today than yesterday.
The paintings, in contrast, are vibrant explorations of color. They are characterized by a dynamic interplay of primary and complementary colors, where warm and cool hues engage in a visual dialogue. While their compositions are simple and minimalistic, sometimes using only one repetitive sign— her spontaneous and visible brushstrokes are imbued with a greater depth and complexity due to the layering of shades and textures.
Lucia di Luciano is a pivotal figure of the Italian artistic movement Arte Programmata. Together with her late husband Giovanni Pizzo, Di Luciano helped launch two distinct artistic endeavors in Rome in the early 1960s: Gruppo 63, which was short-lived but produced a noteworthy literary trend, paving the way to Operativo R. As a post-war innovative and utopian art movement, Arte Programmata wanted to redefine the relationship between individuality and collectivity. At the time, with the conviction that technology would provide the conditions for a new freedom. Early in her career, Di Luciano collaborated with the composer Pietro Grossi, a pioneer in computer music, during a seminal period marked by the intermingling of artistic and scientific methodologies. Her art and philosophy harmonized with Grossi’s electronic music compositions, which he envisioned as a tool to “transform the environment humans inhabit.”
After the disbandment of these collectives, Di Luciano continued her artistic pursuits, always concentrating on the cutting edge investigation of concrete art from a rigorous and radical standpoint. Although Di Luciano first experimented with color theory in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until the 1990s that she introduced primary and complementary colors, as well as differences in temperature, lightness, and saturation, into her work.
The title Essenzialità refers to research Di Luciano conducted in 2001 at the Museo-Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea of the University of Rome, La Sapienza. There, she unveiled “I Gradienti,” a collection of fifty-five paintings, encapsulating her investigative journey into the essence of color and form.
Di Luciano’s influence and relevance were reaffirmed when her work was exhibited at the 2022 Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani, The Milk of Dreams. There, she stood among peers like Liliane Lijn, as part of a collective of women artists who have adeptly merged technology and light, underscoring their pivotal roles in the evolution of contemporary art.
