LUCIA MARCUCCI EXHIBITION "The secrets of language"

2 JUNE - 28 AUGUST 2022

For her first solo exhibition in France "Lucia Marcucci. Les secrets du langage", the contemporary gallery of the MAMAC, plays the confrontation between the works of the 1960s – 1970s, references to the social-political issues of the time, and the last works of the 2000s of the Italian artist, critics of advertising and the dominant culture. The abundance of words, messages and floating images will invite the visitor to immerse himself in the poetic universe of the artist.

Born in Florence in 1933, Lucia Marcucci is one of the leading exponents of visual poetry in Italy and one of the major figures of the Florentine Gruppo 70, which she officially joined in 1965. With Eugenio Miccini, Lamberto Pignotti, Antonio Bueno, Luciano Ori and later Ketty la Rocca, the goal was to revalue language in an era when mass media are developing frantically. The word thus becomes an object in its own right, having its own autonomy in the midst of new communication systems. The relationship between "image" and "word" became their favorite field of linguistic experimentation, and collage, their preferred means of expression.
Constructed from magazine clippings and advertisements accompanied by messages often drawn from the vocabulary of comic book bubbles, Lucia Marcucci's works reinterpret, with provocation and irony, the political and social issues of her time, emphasizing in particular the status of women in contemporary society and the commodification of her image.

In the early 1970s, the artist, like other visual poets, experimented with the use of emulsified canvas (photographic reporting technique), appropriating in many cases images from the History of Art. The resulting black and white and flat allow it to make incisive the juxtaposition or sometimes the underlining of the text and the image. From 1978, the works reveal traces of his physical presence through manual writing. Slogans and images are more autobiographical or anthropomorphic.

The most recent works (2000 – 2012), offer a hybrid research addressing poetry, music, performance and mass communication and recall above all the extraordinary power of the image. In the series "Città Larga", the works are made by manipulating a type of street advertising, widespread and omnipresent at the beginning of the millennium: fabric banners hanging from street lamps in urban areas. These ads often convey images designed according to a popular logic that never stray from the most entrenched clichés. The artist then instrumentalizes them to change their meaning or accentuate the absurdity of the relationship between image and text.

Lucia Marcucci's work was highlighted at MAMAC as part of the group exhibitions "She-Bam Pow Pop Wizz! Les Amazones du POP", 2020-21 – curated by Hélène Guenin and Géraldine Gourbe; and "Vita Nuova. New challenges of art in Italy 1960-1975", summer 2022 – curated by Valérie Da Costa.

Curator of the exhibition
Olivier Bergesi, MAMAC
In collaboration with
Fritelli arte contemporanea, Florence, Italy