Dama di Compagnia

Lucio Pozzi
"Dama di Compagnia", 1985
Graphite and watercolor on paper
The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2008
Vogel 2009.01

Lucio Pozzi was born in Milan. He studied architecture in Rome. In 1962 he came to the United States as a guest of Henry Kissinger's Harvard International Summer Seminar. He settled in New York. In 1968 he developed The Inventory Game, a hand-drawn grid of elements that could be combined in an artwork. Forty years later he wrote, “My interest was not so much in the actual ingredients themselves, as in the idea that the artwork might be created and viewed in the context of the most varied ecology of artistic research ... and not in the shadow of restrictive theories.” Most of his public statements revolve around ideas about freedom of materials and expression. “The materials, the processes, the concepts I work with are not to be put at the service of goals that are outside their substance,” he wrote in his 8 Aphorisms. “Rather, they are the quarry from which I draw the ingredients I make things with. My main quarry is the language of painting.” The Vogels met Pozzi in New York at an opening at 55 Mercer Gallery in 1971. In May 1976 he participated in the inaugural exhibition, Rooms, at P.S.1. In 1983 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship. His artworks -- objects, installations, other constructs, but usually paintings and drawings -- have appeared at galleries in Europe as well as the United States; he exhibits frequently in Italy and his work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as the Kunstmuseum in Basel and the Civica Galleria d’Arte in Gallarate, Italy. Pozzi has taught at Princeton University and Cooper Union.

Image description: A watercolor painting of an abstract human figure in a long dress with the overlapping silhouettes of birds covering their hands. The figure is set against a rectangular black background outlined in light red.