The Brooklyn Rail: Lucio Pozzi with David Ebony

Widely regarded as an elusive multidisciplinary artist who traverses abstraction, figuration, photography and performance, Lucio Pozzi defies easy categorization. Throughout his six-decade career, his art has thwarted conventional art-historical analysis and sidestepped trends in critical art theory. While his work is related to Minimalism, Arte Povera, Fluxus, geometric abstraction, and Expressionism, he has cultivated a unique visual vocabulary. Pozzi is guided by the paradigm he calls “The Inventory Game,” a conceptual instrument that helps liberate him from dogma, from pre-established rules, and allows him access to infinite tools for making art. “No rules but tools,” is a favorite quote. The through-line of his extraordinarily diverse oeuvre is a firm belief in the infinite possibilities of painting. The Italian-born artist from Milan spent decades in New York City and navigated the burgeoning downtown art scene of the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond—a denizen of the avant-garde milieu of the period. He was one of the catalysts for the birth of the influential journal October in the mid-1970s, before launching the edgy culture magazine New Observations in the eighties. Today, Pozzi divides his time between studios in Hudson, New York and Valeggio, Italy. To mark his ninetieth birthday, Pozzi is being honored this year with exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including a survey of his abstract works at the Magazzino Italian Art Museum in Cold Spring, New York.