The Center for Openness and Dialogue opens its next exhibition titled “The Suns of All Lands” by Italian artist Enzo Cucchi, curated by Spazio Taverna (Marco Bassan, Ludovico Pratesi, and Chiara Lorenzetti). Cucchi presents for the first time in Albania a cohesive collection of his creative work. The exhibition remained open from June 5 – July 5, 2025.
The artist brings into dialogue two historical and cultural terrains: Italy of the 1980s and contemporary Albania, as well as reflections on identity and globalization, through 43 works spread across the entire COD space.
The exhibition opens with four symbolic paintings from the 1980s, a particularly significant period in Cucchi’s artistic journey. These early works have not been seen together for decades: “Quadro santo” (1980), “Carro di fuoco” (1981), “Paesaggio barbaro” (1983), and “Il miracolo della neve” (1986), paintings that depict a free spiritual world, outside of standards. These works invite visitors to explore a universe where traditional rituals, the beauty of the sacred, and fragments of dreams coexist.
In the small room on the right, an important part of the exhibition is dedicated to Cucchi’s relationship with his homeland, Marche. The landscape series reveals a more intimate side, where the artist presents real villages and places selected based on personal and sentimental values, showing the artist’s deep connection to his birthplace.
Meanwhile, the final part of the exhibition consists of over twenty previously unpublished drawings, emphasizing the artist’s uninterrupted creative flow—an ongoing visual narrative.
Enzo Cucchi (b. November 14, 1949 in Morro d’Alba, Province of Ancona, Italy) is an influential self‑taught Italian painter and a central figure of the Transavanguardia (Neo‑Expressionist) movement that emerged in the 1980s. Abandoning poetry in the mid-1970s, Cucchi moved to Rome where he embraced painting and formed close ties with fellow Transavanguardia artists like Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, and Nicola De Maria.
His early paintings evoke myth, landscape, legends, and spirituality, presenting symbolic, dreamlike narratives. In 1986, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York hosted a full rotunda solo exhibition—Cucchi’s first major U.S. retrospective. His work is held in major public collections, including MoMA, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
