Andrea Morucchio

After graduating in Political Science at the University of Padua, he began his artistic career in 1989, initially using photography as his means of expression. He created an important body of artwork connected to his long stay in Cuba and Nepal. In the late nineties he started exploring further with sculpture, with a series of works in glass and iron. In the dualistic relationship of antithetical elements – the strength and indestructibility of the iron versus the fragility and transparency of the glass – and in the tension we can find one of the artist’s central cores; refined over the years it now defines an important side of his authorial poetics: glass and iron, fragility and resistance, transparency and obtuseness of matter, mobility and stillness. The sensory interest in the form and expressive potential of the matter never gets separated from the symbolic and metaphorical level.

Currently Morucchio’s work is defined by the specific properties of the material he uses;  something that is also present in his environmental interventions (Reggio Emilia, Australia), which always have a reference to ethical and political issues, such as deforestation or global warming (Eidetic Bush) or his complaint about the congested and controlled mass media system with the Pulse Red lighting installation (Venice, Punta della Dogana).

Not only global themes define Morucchio’s work. In his Rape of Venice installation, he has created an artwork composed with different and uneven materials, using the geometric shapes of the marcian floor to recreate a sort of labyrinth. His vision reflects, in a painful and controversial way, the terminal and suffering situation of his city, Venice, whose material and historical wealth is also used by the artist for his reinterpretation cycle Puzzling. Recombining thousands of images of the Basilica of San Marco’s mosaics, Morucchio recreates ancient and modern paintings: from Caravaggio to Da Vinci, from Titian to Giorgione up to Andy Warhol.

The constant elements in Morucchio’s poetics are an all-round experimentation on the possibilities of matter and a constant commitment to a social and political denunciation. Andrea Morucchio rediscovers, as an artist, an active role in the social sphere, away from an easy hedonism and complacency.

His works are displayed at the Murano Glass Museum, Venice Civic Museums, Hobart Museum of Ancient and New Art, Australia and Provenance Collections, Tacoma, Usa.