Visually rich, idiosyncratic, and often playful, Lucio Pozzi: qui dentro/in here is an irreverent career survey, but also a serious meditation on the nature of art, perception, and materiality. “In here” refers to Magazzino’s soaring, skylighted Gallery 8. Featuring some thirty paintings, sculptures and installations, the exhibition is the largest among several U.S. exhibitions marking the Italian-American artist’s ninetieth year. Solo shows of Pozzi’s work are also concurrently on view at the Italian Cultural Institute and Hal Bromm Gallery in New York City, and at Philip Douglas Fine Art in Hudson, New York. His work is also included in a group show at Art Cake in Brooklyn honoring the late Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.
An overview of more than six decades of Pozzi’s practice, the Magazzino exhibition is a stunner, innovatively curated by David Ebony in collaboration with Magazzino’s artistic director Paola Mura. Pozzi, at 90, is on a roll—with no evidence of slowing down. Many of the most monumental and dramatic works at Magazzino, such as the three bracingly colorful abstract paintings that greet you near the entrance, are from the past year. Although an influential presence in New York and Italy—and long associated with Arte Povera, Minimalism and other contemporary art movements—Pozzi’s multifaceted pursuits were once considered uncategorizable, and therefore, for some, problematic. However, the times, doing what time inevitably does, have finally caught up with him and his independence of spirit and prodigious variability have become more comprehensible now.
Improvisation (and chance) have always been integral to Pozzi’s thinking and his aesthetic, as he avoids preliminary studies or preconceived formulas in art making. However, he uses what he calls The Inventory Game, which lists, in a grid, all the possibilities in materials and techniques that could be used in making his work: resulting in countless permutations. As he likes to say, “tools but no rules.”
There’s a lot going on here, like being ushered into a huge three-dimensional painting brimming with visual conundrums. For example, the show’s dominant colors of red, blue, yellow, and green, are concentrated in Ebony’s Lightwork (2024), which includes glowing lightbulbs in the same four hues. The space is essential to the exhibition, as all spaces are, but this is more deliberative, the gallery activated from floor to ceiling to walls. One dark, densely painted abstraction, a tribute to the late poet David Shapiro (The Last Horizon, 2024), is slanted against the wall touching the floor en pointe, looking as if it had slipped down and crash-landed. Elsewhere, Elbow (1963), a handsome, enameled dark-blue cast iron elbow-like fitting, suggests an improbable, tempting handle to pull open the wall; and the sculptural group Quartet (Messenger, Cosmic Cinema, 2 Catskill Sunsets), 1984, conjures a deconstructed abstract landscape that tips its hat to David Smith.
Lucio Pozzi: qui dentro/ in here, in a state of perpetual interpretative flux, is wondrously contingent and responsive, which is what makes it perpetually reverberant—and relevant.
Lucio Pozzi: qui dentro/ in here on view at Magazzino Italian Art Museum, March 7-June 23, 2025.
Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic, independent curator and journalist whose primary interest is global contemporary art.