Thirty Works, Seven Decades: Lucio Pozzi at Magazzino
While Arte Povera often treats natural materials as they are, Italian New York-based artist Lucio Pozzi is more interested in exploring degrees of control, or lack thereof, his material can exert upon itself. Focusing on a given surface’s vexed dance between precision and freestyle, the artist often confuses boundaries between painting and sculpture, persistently so, through creating geometric shapes that gain dimensionality by way of display and framing. The long-awaited career retrospective, curated by scholar David Ebony, qui dentro/in here at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York, open through June 23, attends to the opacity and underdetermination of his multifaceted practice. An eclectic artist informed by both the language of minimalism and Arte Povera yet never decidedly shaped by either movement, this exhibition, spanning seven decades across some thirty works, presents Pozzi oscillating between history, psychology, geography, genre, and style.
A painted linen component from Triangles—Red (1969) becomes a standalone sculpture in the exhibition. Its higher hang and casual positioning suggest a kind of theatrical mystery unfounded in minimalism. Sometimes, Ebony’s curatorial intrigue makes precise and pleasant discoveries about Pozzi’s practice. 4 Triangles—Red (1969) with Untitled (2002) (2025) arranges two older abstract painting-sculpture works together, becoming a self-reflexive intervention on the artist’s investment in abstraction and the purity of color. For Pozzi, abstraction is ever more recursive and knows no boundary between interiority and exteriority. Portrait of a Self (1999) is a photo of the artist’s face suspended mid-air on a metal chain tied to nylon ropes. The work plays with perception and self-perception, as it is revealed the fact that viewers are being looked at by the artist easily evade them. In Lean on Me (2024), two rod of coated heavy beam leaning against each other ambivalently stand between moments of coupling and decoupling. The inclusion of watercolor works is a welcomed decision. Mr. John Boor’s Farm (1981) and Laggiù (2015) similarly harbor the expansive use of color and free strokes found in Pozzi’s paintings, with more sensitivity and nuance. (For those who enjoy Pozzi’s less seen works on paper, Hal Bromm Gallery in Tribeca currently has an exhibition dedicated to his watercolor works).
The tactic of resembling, but not quite adhering to minimalism is reprised in later plywood works such as the acrylic treated Checkpoint (2017), cut in the abstracted shape of a mark, of border perhaps, with an added cube attached to it facing outward like a threshold, or Diaspora (2018), luminous and spiraling fragments that possibly reference combinations of national flag colors, or Sumsix (2021), six monochrome approximations of square with appendages on their angles that stretch internal relations thin in favor of pointing to other works and the museum space. These works never meet eye level and always look somewhat out of place, almost displaced or unfixed with their light curves and folds —perhaps that is exactly where they should be.
Ever since Pozzi became a core member of downtown Manhattan avant-gardes in early 1960s after his transatlantic move from Italy, he has occupied a unique position in the history of contemporary art. Situated in a high ceiling gallery, the retrospective delights in Pozzi’s ability to be more expressive, than many of his contemporaries, about relational encounters between an artist’s biography, an art object’s history, and the audience’s own history. Facing the fraught sociality of avant-garde positions head-on, the retrospective simultaneously exudes divine bliss, playfulness, and concealed antagonism toward the professionalized system of contemporary art, revealing how after seven decades, Pozzi still resists easy categorization.
Some recent works are quieter despite their eccentric hang. Railroad to Paradise (2022), Key (2024), and The Last Horizon (For David Shapiro) (2024) are paintings full of intuitive gestures, interested in how darker palette affects the surface materiality of canvas or plywood, creating subdued lines, almost-etchings, and splatters and splashes that are harder to trace. A few more traditional and monumental paintings about change of seasons and passages of time, namely The Open Gates of Spring (Persephone) (2023), Visitation (2023-2024), and Neptune’s Wedding (2024), work alongside conventions of Color Field Painting while gesturing toward geometric abstraction, constructing vibrant patches exceptionally organic.
Pozzi’s belated retrospective at Magazzino Italian Art is superbly revelatory insofar as it correctly positions Pozzi as an artist always situated between one and multiple, unity and fragmentation, and here and there while seeking to collapse these distinctions. As the exhibition title in here suggests, to direct the eye toward “here” one must first imagine an outside that is not “here” yet only comes into legibility through “here.” Such is the paradoxical beauty of Pozzi’s practice.
Lucio Pozzi: Qui dentro / In here at Magazzino Italian Art, 2700 US-9, Cold Spring, NY 10516, open through June 23, 2025.
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