Italian Painter Dies at 93

Lucia Di Luciano, an Italian painter associated with the Arte Programmata movement of the 1960s who had only recently gained wider recognition, died last weekend. Her Milan gallery 10 AM Art announced her death but did not specify the cause. Many Italian publications reported that she was 93 years old.

Di Luciano is primarily known for his abstract works of the 1960s, which often consist of black and white grid patterns. She made them entirely by hand, but her work was so precise that today they look as if they were made with computers, before computers were widely available to the public in the 1960s. It is only when standing near these works that one notices the slight differences between Di Luciano’s paintings and her intended compositions.

Unlike many artists of her time, Di Luciano did not only paint in oils. She loved house paint and acrylics, both materials considered “low” or “délcassé” at the time.

Her paintings of the mid-1960s established her as one of the leading figures associated with Arte Programmata, a movement often positioned as Italy’s response to the influx of Op Art from the United States and Britain. Advocates of the movement draw on the aesthetics of computers to consider how ordered systems are formed and broken down. Art historian Lindsay Caplan, who wrote a 2022 book about the movement, wrote that the artistic platform was inherently political because it was about “individual freedom in relation to systemic constraints.”

Di Luciano was born in Syracuse, Italy in 1933 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in the 1950s. While she was studying there, she met the artist Giovanni Pizzo, who later became her husband. Together they participated in avant-garde groups such as Gruppo 63. They remained together, living in Rome until Pizzo’s death in 2022.

DiLuciano describes her career in the 1960s as an uphill battle because she chose a profession that was still unkind to women. To complement her artistic practice, she also opened a clothing store called Mondo Giovane, where she sells Plexiglas purses and plastic miniskirts she designs.

Although she had been painting for nearly eight years, the international art world did not take notice until di Luciano appeared in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2022, curated by Cecilia Alemani. She appears in a section called “Magical Technologies,” which focuses on how active postwar Italian women viewed computers as a means of imagining other worlds.

After the Biennale, di Luciano participated in the exhibition “Electrical Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” opening at Tate Modern in 2024. Her art began appearing at art fairs such as Frieze Masters and Independent 20th Century, as well as at galleries such as Herald St., which hosted di Luciano’s first London exhibition last year. Maxxi, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, is currently organizing a retrospective exhibition expected to open in 2027.

While Di Luciano is still best known for her austere abstract paintings of the 1960s, she eventually introduced color into her grid paintings in the 1970s. Toward the end of her career, she began working in a completely different way. Lovay Fine Arts Gallery’s recent work featured in Independent magazine features rows of brush-like paint, evoking an embrace of entropy not always present in her earlier work.

Whether the rest of the world is paying attention or not, DiLuciano continues to paint every day. “My thoughts are
on the surface of my paintings,” Di Luciano said in a 2022 interview MeetingAccording to reports, she was 89 years old at the time. “Stop working would stop my thinking and even my life.”