Herald St

Lucia Di Luciano

Herald St | 2 Herald St, London, E2 6JT

Museum St | 43 Museum St, London, WC1A 1LY

23 September – 8 November 2025

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“My work has been a continuous transformation. I am a woman who moves forward, I want to move forward, my life is made up of painting, I love only painting.”

– Lucia Di Luciano (1883 Magazine, 2025)

Herald St is delighted to present a two-part exhibition of works by Lucia Di Luciano, taking place across the gallery’s premises in Bethnal Green and Bloomsbury. Marking the nonagenarian artist’s debut solo outing in the United Kingdom, it comprises a historic survey tracing the evolution of her seven-decade career, alongside a vibrant presentation of recent paintings and collages. The exhibition follows Di Luciano’s inclusion in The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani in 2022, as well as last year’s Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern, building on a renewed recognition of the artist’s seminal position within Italy’s twentieth-century vanguard.

Di Luciano started her career at the postwar moment when the emotion-laden and autographic gestures of art informel were beginning to be overthrown by Pop art, Neo-Dada, and an optical, kinetic, and scientific path to abstraction. In the 1960s, she and her late husband Giovanni Pizzo were key figures in the Europe- and Latin America-centric progression towards an objective form of art, which in Italy culminated with Arte Programmata. This prevailing movement comprised a multitude of artist groups, whose research into the mechanisms of light, perception, and dynamism informed their output. In 1963, the couple were among the founders of the collective Gruppo 63, and following its dissolution later the same year they set up Operativo ‘r’. Both communities followed a strictly rationalist process, adhering to theoretical principles such as Gestalt analyses of vision and Bertrand Russell’s writings on mathematical logic, combined with a careful precision to the craftsmanship of their work.

Notably, an important retrospective of Piet Mondrian had taken place at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1956, and this deeply impacted a generation of young artists moving towards a sharp-edged, systematic, and utopic approach – including Di Luciano and Pizzo, who had met in the same year as students at the Academy in Villa Medici. The Galleria Nazionale was led at the time by the formidable Palma Bucarelli, who later became an influential supporter of the artist couple’s work, acquiring a number of paintings for the museum’s collection in 1966. Renowned critics Giulio Carlo Argan and Lea Vergine were also early advocates and wrote seminal texts underlying their practices, and curators Fiamma Vigo and Italo Tomassoni included their works in landmark group exhibitions.

Eschewing oil on canvas for industrial mediums such as Masonite and Morgan’s Paint, Di Luciano’s early paintings are characterised by rhythmic, ‘programmed’ structures that give the impression of being machine-made at a time when calculators and computers were making a nascent appearance in daily life. They embrace Rosalind Krauss’s fulcramatic maxim, ‘the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art,’ rendering each composition devoid of foreground and background and inviting multidimensional readings spanning the architectural, industrial, musical, linguistic, and psychological. At Museum St, a suite of exemplary paintings from 1963 to 1992 demonstrates the transition from black-and-white towards colour and gradient, always contained within a square or rectangle of the golden ratio. Starting in the late 1960s, this chromatic experimentation was, as stated by the critic and curator Paolo Bolpagni, ‘not a betrayal of [her] original commitments, but instead an inevitable extension of [her] research into optical perception’. A 2003 text by Di Luciano echoes this thought: ‘In the 1970s… I began to feel a pressing and ongoing need to use colour… The scientific meanings of colour were well-matched with my aesthetic research, within the rationalisation of artistic procedures.’ She cites Albert Munsell’s 1915 ‘Colour Globe’, as well as ‘colour grammar and syntax’ and the perceptive results of contrasting tones, shades, quantities, luminosity, and saturation as ongoing subjects for analysis in her paintings during this period.

Di Luciano considers the synonymity of her life and work as a continuous process of visual research. In the 1990s she and Pizzo moved to Formello, a small village outside of Rome, to isolate themselves from the world and obsessively dedicate their lives to painting. The move marked a turning point in her practice: the rigid lines of her grids loosened, then began to disappear altogether, and colour – once nonexistent in her paintings – became the main event. At Herald St’s eastern space, a riot of shades ranging from pastel to metallic to neon seem to ignite the walls. Within each tableau is a wealth of details, from small bars and squares of colour, to sweeping paintstrokes, and fine lines, dots, and swirls of ink. There is a palpable shift from her collages of the late 90s which almost appear as helter-skelter catalogues of her early paintings in miniature or fantastical landscapes of farmers’ fields, to the very recent monochromes peppered with tiny, intuitive, and meditative marks. There is a joy to the artist’s descent – or, perhaps more aptly, ascent – into chaos, with rigorous abstraction morphing into evocative mark-making, and in some cases outright figuration: La Mia Casa (2024) depicts her Formello home, a hermitage in her mind, immersed in waves of vivid blue and white paint. In her paean to Di Luciano, Nathalie Du Pasquier mused of the Italian artist’s current work: ‘Of course they come from the previous ones, but little by little freed themselves from the program, while the program remained – “paint every day.”’ In Di Luciano’s own words, ‘My work is not yet over. For me, painting is still all about research, based on rationality, imagination, and creativity. This is a deliberate decision I have made, aware that it will result in adding just the right degree of quality to my life.’

– Text by Émilie Streiff

Lucia Di Luciano arrives in London with her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, a long-awaited and significant moment. It is a debut that feels both overdue and necessary: the work of an artist who has consistently pursued coherence and depth, engaging in dialogue with the cultural and artistic movements around her while developing a language that remains strikingly current and able to speak to our present time with undiminished force.

I discovered Di Luciano’s work fifteen years ago, and since then I have regularly visited her studio in Rome. From the beginning, her practice revealed itself as anything but static: each cycle opens a new field of possibility, each series sets transformation in motion. Her works are alive with energy, activating the gaze through rhythms, sequences, and chromatic shifts that unfold gradually over time.

The path that led to this exhibition also began in a personal context. During a visit to my home in Milan, Nicky Verber encountered a group of her works and immediately recognised their power and relevance. From that moment, the idea of bringing Lucia’s paintings to London took shape—an exhibition that would connect her lifelong practice to a new international audience.

Her story is inseparable from collaboration. With Giovanni Pizzo, her husband and partner in research, Di Luciano was deeply involved in the pioneering years of Arte Programmata. Together they participated in exhibitions and collectives that intertwined art, science, and logic, engaging with leading Italian groups such as Gruppo T in Milan and Gruppo N in Padua in perceptual and kinetic research. Their work also responds to the experimental spirit of Gruppo 63, the literary neo-avant-garde movement that sought new languages across disciplines. Within this constellation, Di Luciano and Pizzo forged their visual research nourished by logic, language, and perception – a utopia of rigour that continues to resonate.

Di Luciano’s paintings are built on repetition and variation, on sequences that function like visual scores. Her works unfold like loops: the return of a theme, slightly modified each time, generating new perceptions with every iteration. This procedure recalls the minimalist compositions of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, or Philip Glass, as well as the early electronic experiments of Pietro Grossi, for whom music was a transformative environment.

Music, in fact, was never marginal in the lives and careers of Di Luciano and Pizzo. Already in the 1960s they cultivated a close relationship with Grossi, founder of the Studio di Fonologia in Florence and a pioneer of electronic music in Italy, who created acoustic installations specifically for their exhibitions. In at least one instance, their visual environments were accompanied by recordings of compositions by Iannis Xenakis, then still active in Le Corbusier’s studio, whose mathematically conceived structures offered a parallel to the permutations and logic underlying Di Luciano and Pizzo’s pictorial language. Later, the two artists followed with particular attention the rhythmic systems of minimalist composers, and the adoption of proportional measures such as the golden section or the Fibonacci series by American composers in the 1970s.

Likewise, Di Luciano’s surfaces are immersive spaces: not images to be consumed in a single glance, but sequences to be traversed slowly—visual scores that treat the eye as an ear, and perception itself as a field of resonance.

Placed in a broader international dialogue, her work resonates with Josef Albers and Agnes Martin, two artists she has studied closely over the years, whose catalogues remain in constant view in her studio. Albers, with his celebrated Homage to the Square series, demonstrated how a single form could generate infinite chromatic perceptions: ‘The arrangement of these squares is carefully calculated so that the colour of each square optically alters the sizes, hues, and spatial relationships of the others’¹. Martin, by contrast, transformed the grid into a site of meditative silence, her subtle lines and rarefied fields offering viewers an experience of inner stillness. In ‘The Untroubled Mind’ (1973), she wrote: ‘Without awareness of beauty, innocence and happiness, one cannot make works of art’². This same sense of quiet radiance is present in Di Luciano’s Variazioni Cromatiche of the early 1990s, where infinitesimal tonal shifts stretch perception toward immaterial thresholds—an art that, like Martin’s, requires time, attention, and a willingness to linger. Yet unlike Martin’s serene stasis, Di Luciano’s variations remain charged with kinetic energy, continually pushing vision into motion.

The exhibition in London brings this richness into focus across Herald St's two venues. In the Bethnal Green gallery works from the 1990s are shown alongside her most recent paintings. Racconto Sonoro (1993) appears as a true visual score, collage and tempera staged as irregular signs and rhythms, like musical bars chasing one another. Variante Cromatica 19 (1997) amplifies this tension: the composition is strict, yet colours arranged in minimal sequences seem to shift and overlap, producing perceptual vibrations. In Senza Titolo (1998), lines dissolve and reappear, so that the pictorial field itself becomes unstable, almost breathing. Alongside these, a series of square-format works painted between 2020 and 2025 radicalises the principle of variation within a fixed structure: monochrome fields broken by flashes of pure colour, trembling lines, and minimal traces that emerge and vanish. This sense of playfulness and movement finds its peak in La Mia Casa (2024), a work in which a childlike house with legs emerges from the painted surface: geometry momentarily turned ironic, almost mischievous, yet still intense.

At Museum St, the historical trajectory is laid out. Alternanze N. 2 (1963) marks the beginning: black and white bands arranged in sequence create optical vibrations that defy the stillness of the picture plane. Two years later, Gruppi di Immagini in Successione Crescente e Decrescente N. 1 (1965) made the logic even clearer: regulated progressions that expand and contract, generating a rhythm at once mathematical and corporeal. Discontinuità (1966–67) pushed the research further, fragmenting sequences and introducing irregularities that destabilise the visual field. With Cromostruttura (1968), monochromy broke open with the introduction of red: a sudden flash of colour inaugurating a new cycle. Cromostruttura N. 26 (1976–79) expanded the chromatic spectrum further, the surfaces modulating into increasingly complex sequences reminiscent of luminous gradients. Struttura Cromatica (1981) showed colour as both rhythm and texture, while Variazioni Cromatiche and Variazioni N. 2 (both 1992) turned subtle gradation into language itself, bringing her painting back to the theme of imperceptible transitions and thresholds between tones.

Viewed together, from the black-and-whites of the early 1960s to the rarefied chromatic notes of the 2020s, her work reveals a constant capacity to move beyond rigid grids, progressively lightening structures and transforming rule into gesture, rigour into intuition. Her recent pieces, created in Rome, maintain the square format and the abstract matrix but open space for rapid marks, pure colours, and light surfaces that read like suspended chromatic annotations.

After a lifetime spent in her studio, in recent years Di Luciano has received renewed international attention. In 2022 she was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale, and in 2024 she was included in the exhibition Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern, which recognised her as a central figure in shaping a language that bridges art, science, and perception. Today, more than sixty years since her beginnings as an artist, she continues to paint every day with the same persistence and curiosity.

Di Luciano has built a body of work grounded in daily practice, in discipline and imagination, in repetition and freedom. Hers is an art that has never chased fashion, yet has known how to transform, remaining faithful to itself. Perhaps this is her greatest strength: the ability to continue surprising us, to remain perpetually new, to never cease seeking. For this reason, her London debut is not only a tribute to a long and coherent career, but above all a window onto the future. Di Luciano’s painting does not look backward but forward. It is an art that walks, that renews itself, that refuses to remain still. As she herself has always maintained, art must change, must move, must breathe with the time that carries it. And looking at her work today, we realise that this movement has never stopped—and that it will continue, still, to project itself into what is yet to come.

¹ Encyclopaedia Britannica, Josef Albers, accessed September 2025.

² Agnes Martin, ‘The Untroubled Mind’, in Agnes Martin (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1973), pp. 17–24.

– Text by Fabio Cherstich