Mattia Jona La Portantina +39 02 8053315 mattjona@mattiajona.com


 
LUCIO DEL PEZZO
Naples 1933 - Milan 2020

Del Pezzo was an Italian artist, painter and sculptor. Among the founders of the Gruppo 58 of Naples, with a neo-surrealist and neo-Dadaist approach, together with artists such as Guido Biasi, Bruno Di Bello, Sergio Fergola, Luca (Luigi Castellano) and Mario Persico. The history of the group is closely linked to the 1952 Nuclearist Manifesto drawn up by Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo in Milan, of which they decide to follow in the footsteps, promoting an art that contains a revival of the local iconological tradition while breaking the traditional figurative schemes. Del Pezzo has also collaborated with the magazine Documento Sud. His works from the 1958-1960 period proposed assemblies of various objects, including fragments of prints and popular images. In 1960 he moved to Paris, then to Milan, where several monographic exhibitions were dedicated to him. Starting from 1962, Del Pezzo created his own repertoire of "paintings" or "sculptures", made up of monochrome geometric panels, on which shelves or hollowed out concavities are inserted, which support regular geometric objects, sometimes very colorful. The playful aspect is always present in his object-paintings and assemblages. For the ironic tone and for the use of decontextualized everyday objects, these works refer to Pop Art; but there is an evident recovery of Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi and of the geometries of metaphysical painting.