Portrait of Enzo Cucchi, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.
Enzo Cucchi possesses a poetic sensibility that resists categorization—subtle, enigmatic, and charged with symbolic force. A central voice in the Italian Transavanguardia, he has spent decades crafting a visual language that evades fixed definitions. His work is radically intuitive, mythological, and defiant of context. Instead, it unfolds like a dream: layered, fragmentary, and permeated by a metaphysical current that resists resolution.
This spring marks his return to New York with Mostra Coagula, a solo exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery—his first major US show since his landmark exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1986. To mark the occasion, we spoke over Zoom, in Italian. Cucchi declined to be seen on camera. Instead, he constructed a miniature stage before his screen: a mise en scène animated by a small, mysterious creature performing in front of a painting, with a handwritten note in the background reading “Great Alex K., Great Julian S.”—a reference that will resurface in the conversation.