Giorgio Zucchini (Bologna, 1939), painter and installation artist, lives and works in Bologna. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna and taught at the Bologna Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts of Ravenna.

THE ARTIST

Giorgio Zucchini made his debut in 1972, taking part in the group exhibition Prospettive 5 in Rome and holding his first solo exhibition at Galleria Duemila in Bologna, where he exhibited again two years later. His major solo exhibitions include those at Galleria San Fedele in Milan in 1974, Galleria Pellegrino in Bologna in 1976, Studio d’Arte Annunciata in Milan in 1984, and Galleria Studio G7 and Galleria Spazia in Bologna in 1986. He has also taken part in important group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including the landmark Anniottanta exhibition.

An eclectic artist, Giorgio Zucchini was among the group of artists whom critic Renato Barilli identified as the Nuovi-Nuovi from their very first exhibition. In the early 1970s, his work was characterised by the introduction of elements drawn from Arte Povera and Conceptual Art into traditionally pictorial works.

Towards the end of the decade, Zucchini began working on his camere ottiche — optical devices conceived as miniature theatres for seeing. From the 1980s onwards, he returned to painting, which became a material embodiment of these earlier visual chambers. Small objects, flowers and tiny animals now populate his works: fragments of memory emerging among chromatic shadows, creating a sense of wonder through their unexpected, precious appearance. Softly modulated backgrounds in muted greens, yellows and blues give the compositions their distinctive delicacy.

THE EXHIBITION

Giorgio Zucchini’s work is deeply rooted in the spirit of the places where he was born and has always lived, amid experiences both minute and unfathomable, unfolding among ancient walls and cherished objects along paths that subtly echo one another. He is a distinctly Emilian painter, intimately connected to the land and to an ancestral archaeology from which, as in a Baroque Wunderkammer, a personal inventory emerges: a corpus of marginal objects, optical distractions and traces of a vanished language.

This major figure in contemporary art offers an example of an artistic practice cultivated through the quiet emotion of images contemplated until they slowly emerge. Zucchini has always painted in tempera, moving between large, imaginative canvases and small-format works in which he captures enchanting details, continually renewing our sense of wonder through matter, light and colour.