Lucia Di Luciano, a central figure in the research ofkinetic-programmed art, has passed away at the age of 93. Over the course of a career spanning more than 70 years, the artist established herself as a leading protagonist of what Lea Vergine called the last avant-garde of twentieth-century art, consistently taking part in the most relevant international exhibitions. Among her most recent participations is her presence at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Lucia Di Luciano’s works are now part of important public and private collections worldwide; in recent years they have been acquired by the Tate Modern in London, MAMCO in Geneva, the Panoptès Collection in Brussels, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia, and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, among others.
Within the many experiences that have developed in the field ofProgrammed Art, Lucia Di Luciano’s work has stood out for its extraordinary coherence and methodological rigor. In the early 1960s, together with her husband Giovanni Pizzo, she was the co-founder in Rome of two artistic projects: the Gruppo 63, active for only a year but decisive for the birth of an important literary movement, and later theOperativo R, which arose from its ashes and was characterized by a longer duration. Both experiences were united by a formal research based on complex mathematical structures, capable of imitating the processes of technology without direct recourse to technical means. Inspired by the functioning of the first automatic calculators, which were just beginning to become widespread in those years, and in an attempt to eliminate any emotional component from the work, Di Luciano initially chose to exclude color, as evidenced by the series Irradiations (1965). At the same time he made black-and-white compositions on masonite, with an almost psychedelic appearance, constructed through the strict sequence of squares and rectangles to suggest movement through vibrations, impulses and visual tensions. Titles such as Alternative Relationship, Divergences, Rhythms explicitly recall the structuralist experiments of Constructivism and Bauhaus.
An extensive retrospective is planned for 2027 at MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome, his adopted city.
Pictured: Lucia Di Luciano, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022
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| Farewell to Lucia Di Luciano, protagonist of the last Vanguard of twentieth-century art |
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