Lucia Leuci

Dichotomy + lexicon Lucia Leuci’s Materia Prima at Fondazione Adolfo Pini, May 18 – Jul 14

16 May 2017

Lucia Leuci is presenting solo exhibition Materia Prima at Milan’s Fondazione Adolfo Pini, opening May 18 and running to July 14.

Curated by /77, the site-specific installation is located inside glass cabinets of the “precise identity and the history” of the museum. The press release describes the work as ‘unitary,’ not altering the function but working within and alongside it.

Made of both synthetic and organic materials, the sculptures explore “the dichotomy between nature and representation of the real, bound together by a gastronomical lexicon.” The dish compositions have been produced in collaboration with Sara Nicolosi.

See the Fondazione Adolfo Pini website for details.**

Courtesy Lucia Leuci
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Cupid’s Clearasil (2016) exhibition photos

5 January 2017

The Cupid’s Clearasil group exhibition at Portland’s Country Bumpkin ran from August 6 to September 29, 2016. 

Curated by Joaquin Dollar, the show featured work by Lila de Magalhaes, Lucia Leuci, Santiago Leyba and Justine Rivas.

Justine Rivas, ‘Pattern of a crowd’ (2016). Installation view. Image courtesy of Joaquin Dollar and Country Bumpkin, Portland.

An accompanying text goes as follows:

“Imagine Cupid growing up and getting pimples, along with all of the anxiety and identity dysphoria associated with that. A slug imagines itself and it becomes. Through a variety of drawing and sculpture, the works present the imaginings and becomings promised in the liminal. 

With a range of materials from found objects, ceramics, textiles, and epoxy resin to mixed media drawing, Country Bumpkin exploits the rawness of the unfinished basement as a meditation on liminality. Works in the space coalesce around the ever evolving landscape of crumbling cement and darkness.”**

The Cupid’s Clearasil group exhibition was on at Portland’s Country Bumpkin from August 6 to September 29, 2016. 

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Lucia Leuci @ TILE, Apr 5 – 29

4 April 2016

Lucia Leuci is presenting solo exhibition mamme cattive, bambini creoli (Bad mothers, creole kids) at Milan’s TILE project space, opening April 5 and running to April 29.

The Bari-based artist will present a series of sculptures installed, arranged and then “modified by several actions” to create a surreal scene where “stories between parents and children are analyzed by the artist’s personal view”.

A short piece of prose in the press release introduces the theme around identity-building, cultural construction and social interaction that forms new languages and defines “the crumbling away of old cultural and social model boundaries”:

“In his eye I saw the glare of a small figure, backlit, brought to a rusty railing with the peeling paint. A tiny hand, intent to shake with atavic phlegm a shabby cloth, didn’t realize that the dust dealt feverish in the air”

See the FB event page for details.**

Lucia Leuci, Rose’s Portrait (2015). Install view. Courtesy The Art Markets, Milano.
Lucia Leuci, Rose’s Portrait (2015). Install view. Courtesy The Art Markets, Milano.
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AFA 2 @ Pane e Pomodoro reviewed

21 August 2015

AFA 2, running from July 29 to August 12, is a lightweight exhibition. It could fly away with the first summer breeze. It leans on the public beach of Bari in Italy waiting for the sun to set, folded and unfolded in a ritual which determines its existence. Thirteen international artists invited by 63rd-77th STEPS design a series of black and white print towels for the historical coastline of Pane e Pomodoro, its intense life discreetly interrupted by this spectral summer collection lying on the sand. The towels are unfolded from afternoon till evening among the haphazard lines of bathers, arranged in random order daily, in an event that lies somewhere between guerilla marketing and the human right to tan.  

Pane e Pomodoro is a popular beach: just like the dish from which it took its name. Bread, oil, salt, water, tomato. In the heart of a landscape of contaminated beauty, where the sand isn’t natural: the shore being artificially designed following an asbestos removal project nearby. It assimilates and defines their waves. And it stays there, soft and still until the flow of people slows at sunset.

Uffe Isolotto, 'Phallus-Vagina Dentata (Sarlacc, Graboid, ???, Shai-Hulud)' (2015) @ AFA 2. Install view. Courtesy 63rd-77th STEPS.
Uffe Isolotto, ‘Phallus-Vagina Dentata (Sarlacc, Graboid, ???, Shai-Hulud)’ (2015) @ AFA 2. Install view. Courtesy 63rd-77th STEPS.
 Thirteen black and white print towels, faded as if by the sun, impress on the sand. They’re uninhabited islands on densely populated portions of coast, between the midi-sounds of the piano bar, the haze of some merry embers, the kids playing football and the shouts of their parents. The unsaturated images realized by the artists and printed on terry cloth are situated in the very multicoloured peak of people, marking some short pauses. They are sudden grey zones from which everything seems to be more distant: the hunger, the heat, the excitement, the anger, the Mediterranean sea. They soften like from a higher sense of suspension, innocence, restlessness, desolation.

This is the feeling of the three bathers portrayed in Fabio Santacroce‘s ‘Mare Nostrum’, that can be found in a lot of the creatures evoked on the towels: from the monkeys sketched in the white by Ditte Gantriis, to the hypersexualized female ants by Lucia Leuci. There are the tentacular eruptions of the ‘Phallus-vagina Dentata’ by Uffe Isolotto and the pale masks by Liz Craft, the threatening black claw between the small birds cages by Rosa Ciano, and then the four-handed zombies of the ‘Gmorkrunoff’ by Rolf Nowotny.

Ilya Smirnov, 'Unum adversus Omnia' (2015) @ AFA 2. Install view. Courtesy 63rd-77th STEPS.
Ilya Smirnov, ‘Unum adversus Omnia’ (2015) @ AFA 2. Install view. Courtesy 63rd-77th STEPS.

All these aberrations of the body are probably generated by the contradictions of ‘meridian thought’, as sociologist Franco Cassano calls it, faced with global economy. The same suggestion comes in the sign of Spencer Longo’s ‘Work Ethic’, Michelangelo’s ‘Dying Slave’ stuck on a doner kebab spit by Pentti Monkkonen and the cluster of ‘submit’ icons carpeting Maja Cule’s ‘Submit to AFA’, which spills out from the Internet to the beach in Bari. For an instant they may seem like a collection of bottle caps and cigarette butts: that’s just the effect of visual pollution. It’s a bit like the darkened emoticons sadly reclining on the pain rating scale of Bradford Kessler’s ‘Even Diablos Get The Blues’, or the plots and symbols of the Transpacific Partnership of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization intertwining in the ‘Factory Trawler’ by Michael Assiff.

Guiding us through this variable and irregular itinerary, we bump into Ilya Smirnov‘s lost children with a torch, which rather seems like the lantern of Diogenes the Cynic: ‘contra omnia adversa’ (against all). But there is no light and no words showing us the way. And maybe we can’t do anything else but get lost in this reality. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

AFA 2 group exhibition, organised by 63rd-77th STEPS, was on at Bari’s Pane e Pomodoro Beach, running July 29 to August 12, 2015.

Header image: Rosa Ciano, ‘Ready for the fog’ (2015). Install view. Courtesy 63rd-77th STEPS.

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Lucia Leuci, Rose’s portrait (2015) exhibition photos

29 June 2015

The brainchild of Italian art editor Ingrid Melano started as a university project for a course titled ‘The Art Markets’. Like most humble begins in the digital age, The Art Markets cultural association started as a blog about contemporary art, filled with reviews of exhibitions Melano had come across through her travels. Now in its six year, the project continues its bimonthly cycle of events, inviting artists to present a new work accompanied by a DJ set at The Art Markets space in Milan. For one of its spring editions, the art project had invited Milanese artist Lucia Leuci to show her latest exhibition, Rose’s portrait.

Screen Shot 2015-06-28 at 3.14.53 PM
Lucia Leuci, Rose’s Portrait (2015). Install view. Courtesy The Art Markets, Milano.

The solo exhibition is introduced with a short text describing textually the girl that we are to see visually represented in the exhibition: “She is a romantic girl,” it begins, “in fact, one morning while soaking a biscuit in her cappuccino, she felt touched.” Painting the picture of a girl with a white iPhone, racially sensitive emoticons, and tight Lycra clothing, Rose is just contradictory enough to be convincing. “Rose is Rose,” the text ends, and the exhibition, showing the supposed Rose’s long braid held together with a flower-patterned scrunchie and the “pretty tits” she gets lost drawing, picks up where the text left off.

Rose Portrait by Lucia Leuci was display on at Milan’s The Art Markets from April 24 to May 8.

Header: Lucia Leuci, Rose’s Portrait (2015). Exhibition view. Courtesy The Art Markets, Milano

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