“What Remains”. The World of Cesare Lucchini
Cesare Lucchini created an outstanding painting oeuvre in which he unites abstract-expressionist painting with the present. On the occasion of his 75th birthday, the Kunstmuseum Bern is paying tribute to the ticinese artist with a retrospective. The exhibition "What Remains": The World of Cesare Lucchini will be the first-ever survey of his entire oeuvre. By mounting this show, the Kunstmuseum Bern is continuing on with a highly acclaimed series of monographic exhibitions dedicated to Swiss artists of our more recent past.
For many years Cesare Lucchini has been chronicling current events in large-format paintings – politically explosive occurrences that cannot leave spectators cold. Thus his visual imagery features the refugees of Lampedusa as well as child soldiers or animals that have become the sad victims of environmental disasters. Thematically his paintings often mirror events that fill the newspapers, which Lucchini, an attentive reader thereof, relates in an extremely personal, almost cryptic visual language.
Ambiguity is essential to Lucchini's paintings. This is due to certain pictorial elements undergoing a metamorphosis in the painting process and taking on a life of their own. For over 50 years he has confined his art to the medium of painting. However, he does not consider it just a medium for representation but a field of artistic research. For Lucchini painting is an event because it gives birth to the unexpected and has many surprises in store. He simultaneously explores individual themes in several paintings. In his eyes a series of pictures is complete when he can no longer draw anything new out of a subject.
Since the 1990s, bodies of his work bear titles such as Quasi una testa (Like a Head), Qualcoasa si mouve (Something is Moving), or Quello che rimane (What Remains), the latter being his most recent series from which the exhibition has its title. All the paintings zero in on the human figure, they are narratives of human presence. Lucchini draws comparisons within his bodies of works; the stages of a composition and subject matter are about change – about the past and present. The titles he gives his paintings point out an instant of instability, point out transitions that can lead to things vanishing forever.
The Ticinese artist Cesare Lucchini was born 1941 in Bellinzona. In 1965 he graduated as an art student from the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he lived and worked until 1988. Subsequently his home was in Düsseldorf and Cologne for many years. Today he lives and works in Lugarno. His diverse oeuvre characteristically reflects the reception of international trends in art.
On the one hand, the exhibition “What Remains”: The World of Cesare Lucchini seeks to trace how the artist developed his visual language in key exhibits. On the other, the show is presenting his major bodies of works of the last two decades. The exhibition commences with the abstract paintings of his beginnings as an art student in the 1960s. It then retraces how Lucchini explored pop art and the potential of representing interiors during the 1970s. And, not least, it investigates his confrontation with German painting and the so-called Junge Wilde (Wild Youth) in the circle around Georg Baselitz in the 1980s, through to the large-format series of recent years.
Curators: Rainer Lawicki, Kunstmuseum Bern
Contact person: Maria-Teresa Cano, Director of the Communications and Art Education Department, , Tel.: +41 31 359 01 89
