An exhibition in Bolzano dedicated to Lucia Marcucci, the queen of Italian visual poetry

Entitled Poems and Not , the exhibition that Museion in Bolzano is dedicating, from June 9 to September 3, 2023, to one of the greatest exponents of visual poetry, namely Lucia Marcucci (Florence, 1933), on the occasion of her 90th birthday. On display are works that give voice to the artist’s artistic research and experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s: the works come from the Mart, the artist’s private collection, and especially from the Archive of New Writing part of Museion’s museum collection. The focus that the South Tyrolean institute wishes to devote to her, curated by Frida Carazzato, is in fact part of the constant research that the museum dedicates to the enhancement of its collection, to its protagonists and protagonists, highlighting from time to time the contemporaneity of the research and the different artistic and interdisciplinary connections.

Marcucci’s works speak of post-World War II Italy, characterized by the economic boom, a social and political reorganization, and, towards the end of the 1960s, also by student protests and feminist movements. In this climate, many artists and women artists chose to express themselves in unconventional mediums, with new techniques and focusing on interdisciplinarity, as evident in the artist’s own works.

The title of the exhibition, Poesie e no, derives from a poem-show by Lamberto Pignotti and Eugenio Miccini presented in a first version in 1963 at the invitation of Lucia Marcucci, directed by Enrico Sirello, and which had in the following years several presentations and the participation of the artist herself. The title, like the entire exhibition, is meant to emphasize how Marcucci’s artistic practice has always been characterized by the encounter between “high” and “low” culture, between literary and everyday language expressed through mass media: a marriage of text and image, painting and collage, tragic and ironic.

The visual and sound collage of the first performance of Poems and No appears on the one hand as a graft of the research on language with the Dada and Futurist tradition, implemented by Gruppo 70 (an artistic collective born in Florence, of which Lucia Marcucci was a part) and on the other hand as an expression of the artist’s non-linear approach to art. Theexploration of the word in its different declinations starts from a critical and contesting attitude, sometimes markedly militant and yet, always ironic and free. These characteristics also inspired the exhibition layout, curated by the graphic design studio Bruno of Venice

Placed instead in a temporal parenthesis closer to the present day are Marcucci’s works exhibited at Piccolo Museion - Cubo Garutti. These are iconic images from the history of art, for example Botticelli’s Venus or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, printed on large canvases enriched by pictorial interventions that play with these images, expanding on their expropriation by mass culture.

Museion’s exhibition is rounded out with The Offense at ar/ge kunst, curated by Francesca Verga and Zasha Colah. The two solo shows gravitate around the experience that gave birth to the Poems and No Happening. The collage of visual and linguistic signs that characterizes this series of performances allows the two institutions to develop complementary strands of Marcucci’s work: on the one hand, the investigation of language starting from the critique of consumer society that finds space in Museion, and on the other hand, the presence of the verb and body in militancy, through a reading also implemented by contemporary voices in the exhibition at ar/ge kunst.

On the occasion of the two exhibitions, the visual communication laboratory (Exhibition Graphic Design: processes of cultural practice) of the Faculty of Design and Arts of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (lecturer and workshop leader Elisa Pasqual, with Gianluca Camillini and Gerhard Gluher), developed seven communication projects that expand themes present in the work of Lucia Marcucci and the Group ’70 in a contemporary key. The workshop exhibition will open June 9 at 6 p.m. at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (University Square 1) and will also be on view on Saturday, June 10.

Complementing Marcucci’s work is also the exhibition Re-Materialization of Language at the Antonio dalle Nogare Foundation, Bolzano, which is hosting some of his works. There is also a talk by artist Nora Turato on 09.06. at 8 p.m. to conclude this exhibition. The exhibition opens Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday closed. Free admission.

Courtesy of

Courtesy of

The artist.

Lucia Marcucci was born in 1933 in Florence, where she still lives and works. Toward the end of the 1950s she began to devote herself to poetry through the technique of collage. During the 1960s she joined Gruppo 70, composed of her, Eugenio Miccini, Luciano Ori, Lamberto Pignotti and for some collaborations also Antonio Bueno and Ketty La Rocca. The double verbo-visual code is used by Marcucci according to a cohesion between word and image with a provocative and desecrating result, often underlined by unscrupulous messages taken from the terminology of comic balloons, which constitute an original version from the programmatic lines of Group 70. This disbanded at the end of 1968 and Lucia Marcucci together with other visual poets, founded the International Group of Visual Poetry. From this time she continued her artistic experimentation developing more autonomous and independent themes. In the production of recent years Marcucci uses not only the collage technique and digital but also advertising images by manipulating the posters that paper the suburbs of cities.

An exhibition in Bolzano dedicated to Lucia Marcucci, the queen of Italian visual poetry

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