Enzo Cucchi

(b Morro d’ Alba, Italy, 1949) Italian painter, draughtsman and sculptor. Cucchi is a self-taught painter who began as a painters apprentice at an early age. Cucchi had his first solo exhibition in 1977 at the Galleria Luigi de Ambrogi in Milan; and went on to show at the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte in Rome and the Galleria Emilio Mazzoli in Modena. In 1979 Achille Bonito Oliva labeled Cucchi’s figurative style, along with Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino, ‘Transavanguardia’. Cucchi’s paintings and drawings often feature stream-of-consciousness themes on a very large scale. His work is frequently features textured surfaces depicting opposing forces such as: dark versus light, destruction versus creation and death versus life. Cucchi has continued to exhibit regularly since the early 1980s. In addition to numerous commissions and retrospectives of his work, he was honored with the Comuni Belluno e di Cortina d’Ampezzo’s Premio Artista dell’Anno in 2004.