Lucio Pozzi

Milano, 1935. Based in Hudson (NY) and Valeggio sul Mincio (VR)

A secretly subversive artist, Pozzi has long used Conceptual Art as a point of departure to question the assumptions embedded in art-making. In his ongoing search for intensity and inspiration, he works within a structure that continuously alternates differentiated artistic experiences. The works of his youth reflect the great European artistic currents – Cubism, Surrealism, Metafisica – onto which he subsequently grafted his knowledge of the great American artists and movements, from Abstract Expressionism to the New York School, from Conceptual Art to Fluxus, whose temperament and field of exploration he shared between the 1960s and 1970s.
Consistent with his generation and his practice, Pozzi has always foregrounded the linguistic dilemmas of painting, both in its dialectical component of mark and surface and with regard to the emotional connotations of colour.
Over the decades of his artistic activity, Pozzi has been a tireless experimenter in varied techniques and vernaculars, pursuing an art that transcends style as it is conventionally understood and concluding in an eclectic and yet cohesive practice that rejects rigid criteria and labels.
From painting to sculpture, from drawing to photography and from installations to performance, Lucio Pozzi today remains a versatile master of enduring intellectual significance and inexhaustible artistic fertility.
His work is included in innumerable private and public collections. It is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the New York Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum, the Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was presented at Documenta 6 (1977) and in the American pavilion of the 1980 Venice Biennale. In 1978 he was the subject of one of the first solo exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art’s Projects series. He has taught in Yale University’s Sculpture Masters Programme and at Cooper Union, Princeton University, Maryland Institute of Art and the Brera Academy. He is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York.
He has held exhibitions at the University of Massachusetts and at the museums of Bielefeld and Karlsruhe; at Milan’s Studio Carlo Grossetti; and in the New York galleries of Leo Castelli, John Weber and Susan Caldwell.