Lucia di Luciano, a 93-Year-Old Italian Abstraction Pioneer, Makes Her U.S. Debut

Lovay Fine Arts presents Lucia di Luciano at the Independent 20th Century New York Art Fair

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, September 3, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Lovay Fine Arts is pleased to present the first U.S. feature dedicated to the career of Italian artist Lucia di Luciano (b. 1933), showing works from 1962 to 2024.

At 93 years old, Lucia di Luciano’s exploration of abstraction’s many legacies continues to evolve. Our booth celebrates the uncompromising creativity of the Italian artist, bringing together her 1960’s programmatic black-and-white geometric works, with her most recent liberated, colorful, and experimental paintings.

Di Luciano, together with her late husband Giovanni Pizzo (1934–2022), were pivotal figures in the Arte Programmata movement in the early 1960s (3 works shown on the booth). Emerging in the postwar era, the movement emphasized geometric abstraction as a universal visual language capable of transcending cultural and geographic boundaries. In Italy, the artists of Arte Programmata based their compositions on rules, programmed systems, or serial sequences, deliberately delegating authorship in order to challenge the traditional notion of the artist and exploring art as a process. They collaborated with musicians, in particular with the composer Pietro Grossi, a pioneer in computer-generated music, as well as initiated several collectives of artists in Rome, most notably Gruppo 63 and Operativo R. After this groundbreaking period, during the 1970s through the 1990s, di Luciano gradually delved into color theories. While her foundational interest in structure and systems remained, she started to fully embrace color as a main component (1 work shown on the booth).


“My work has been a continuous transformation. Today, at 93, I get up in the morning and think about how I can express myself better today than yesterday!” Lucia di Luciano

Beginning in the early 2000’s, she gradually moved beyond the strict rigor that had defined her earlier practice with her visual language expanding to include a larger palette, organic forms and irregular geometries. Over this past decade, di Luciano’s works shifted substantially, marked by more experimentation and merging various techniques to create an idiosyncratic abstract universes (1 work shown on the booth).

Her most recent works since 2022 are characterized by bold chromatic experimentation, gestural freedom, and a deepened engagement with the emotional approach (6 works shown on the booth). Yet her practice remains deeply connected to the broader history of abstraction. In a very intuitive approach, she merges diverse artistic histories, styles, and typologies, incorporating a wide range of gestures and techniques, including drawing, pen doodling, dripping, and expressive hand-painting —recalling elements of Op Art, color field, expressionism, outsider art, or non-Western pictural traditions. The result is a dynamic and personal panorama of abstraction’s many legacies, while remaining unmistakably her own mental and emotional landscape.
Prior to the 2023 exhibition at Lovay Fine Arts in Geneva, di Luciano’s contemporary work had not been publicly shown for nearly 30 years, since the early 1990’s.

“Today, I can say it wasn't easy to be a woman and an artist. My story, from the beginning, has always been the struggle to achieve the possibility of being recognized. Starting from my family, then at the Art Academy in my nude class in the early-1950’s I was the only woman apart from the models. It was necessary to be accepted by a world of artists who were always men. But the female artists of the time were neither dolls nor idiots, they were women with strong characters: Their talent was the real novelty of those years.”
Lucia di Luciano

Lucia di Luciano’s works were featured in the central pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 (The Milk of Dreams, Curated by Cecilia Alemani). Her works are held in major public collections, including Tate Modern, London; MAMCO, Geneva; the VAF-Stiftung in Frankfurt; MACBA, Buenos Aires and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.

Lovay Fine Arts is proud to present di Luciano's works at the Independent 20th Century Art Fair in New York, 4-7 September 2025

Christina Ioannou
CCIcomms
christina@ccicomms.com

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