Pucci | Clash | April 2024

Von Buren Contemporary presents

CLASH

the solo exhibition of

NICOLA PUCCI

Presentation text Gianluca Marziani

Von Buren Contemporary
Via Giulia 13, 00186 Rome

Von Buren Contemporary is delighted to present CLASH, the solo exhibition of internationally-know, long-standing gallery artist Nicola Pucci.

Pucci creates a disorienting sense of colliding worlds in his original and startling oil paintings, in which movement and speed are central elements. By juxtaposing contrasting or ‘clashing’ subjects and situations, the artist presents the viewer with an improbable image which results in a temporal and visual short circuit.

In Pucci’s unique universe, something sudden and unexpected, if not outright impossible, is sure to burst onto the canvas, disrupting an otherwise ordinary, everyday moment and shaking the viewer out of the torpor of habit and routine.

Clash is divided into two parts, the first focusing on Pucci’s oil paintings on canvas, and the second on the artist’s large Fine Art Prints reproducing his most iconic works. These artworks are unusual in that they are attached to aluminium panels which are subsequently painted on by the artist, so each print carries Pucci’s direct, extensive, one-off artistic intervention.

Born in Palermo in 1966, Nicola Pucci boasts a masterly technique which has won the attention of important figures in the art world including America’s Larry Gagosian and Carlo Bilotti, the late Florida-based international cosmetics buyer and art collector.

Pucci has exhibited in Italy, the USA, England, France and South Korea and held high-profile solo shows in museum spaces such as Palermo’s Villa Zito (2020), Spoleto’s contemporary art museum Palazzo Collicola and Rome’s Carlo Bilotti Museum. His work is to be found in the permanent collections of the Carlo Bilotti Museum and the Sicily Museum of Contemporary Art (MacS) in Catania, as well as the private Fendi, Benetton and Gagosian collections.

Pucci works largely from photographs, often combining elements from different sources within a single painting. While drawing upon various influences including Surrealism and the art of Francis Bacon, Pucci nonetheless stands apart from defined contemporary trends or movements.