Word: cucchi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...offspring, or some of them, at the Guggenheim Museum. "Italian Art Now: An American Perspective" is the latest in the Guggenheim's discursive series of "sample shows" of the current art of different nations. It covers the work of seven artists: three painters (Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Nino Longobardi), two sculptors (Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio) and two conceptual/per formance artists (Luigi Ontani and Vettor Pisani). Most of these men are in their 30s, and Pisani, the oldest...
...best-known artists on view, at least to American eyes, are Chia and Cucchi, both of whom are hotly pursued by collectors here and abroad. One can see why Chia, 36, has a following. It is hard either to dislike his work (it is too educated and, often, too funny for that) or be really moved by it (for the same reasons). It is ideal decor for the early '80s, revivalism tempered by well-placed clues of irony. It is chic, like a Fendi fur with metaphysical yearnings. Chia can run up a good-looking, hyperactive surface-all those...
...With Cucchi, 31, the problem is reversed. His paintings-of drowning swimmers and divers (like A Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Sea , 1980), heroes tormented by doppelgangers and harsh schematic landscapes-are elaborately ill-painted in order to support the fiction of terminal earnestness. This, of course, is the main trick in the repertory of neo-expressionist effects, and Cucchi does it over and over again. The best of his paintings here, The Mad Painter, 1981-82, seems to parody this condition; the rest simply deploy their accepted rhetoric of crudity as vitality. Artists of Cucchi...
...selling Europeans to Americans; beneath all the excited talk of how American cultural imperialism has at last been rejected, and how national artists in Germany or Italy dominate the cultural horizon, the same mechanisms of the market grind imperturbably on. Last year it was young Italian artists-Cucchi, Chia, Clemente; this year, Germans...