Luigi Zuccheri | Sylvia Kouvali
Luigi Zuccheri liked animals and disliked people. He made this preference clear in his work. From the postwar years until his death in 1974, the Venetian painter produced small landscapes in muddy egg tempera. Each composition maroons tiny, barely delineated figures among oversized animals, trees and plants.
Over time, this inverted perspective grew more extreme. His blameless beasts grew bigger. The humans shrank. The Sylvia Kouvali gallery, which hosts a small Zuccheri exhibition in London this summer, calls all this a “delicate exercise of misanthropy”.
Paesaggio con ghiandaia e figure umane (1955/65)
Why have these bleak little paintings stayed with me? They’re murky and crude. The tones are uneven, thanks to the quick-drying, unforgiving paint. But, when I first saw a Zuccheri exhibition at the Karma gallery in New York last spring, I liked it so much that I squeezed the show’s poster into the one backpack I travelled with. It made it back to London, only slightly crumpled. Now it hangs framed in my hallway, and sometimes makes me stop and stare as I’m coming in or going out.
I think I’m hooked by the work’s psychological charge. Zuccheri’s warped, crowded compositions seem like pure projections from a troubled mind, rather than being from nature. They don’t try to feel real. They’re flat and obsessive.
The repetition of a narrow range of motifs — Zuccheri paints angry skies, flat buildings, grass, and mud, over and over — certainly feels obsessive. He resembles Giorgio Morandi, a close contemporary, in this monomaniacal focus.
This time around, maybe it’s also the staging. Sylvia Kouvali’s gallery is, as usual, lit harshly. Strong floor lights cast hard shadows on the walls. The effect enhances the work. The memorably unpretty work.
Luigi Zuccheri is at Sylvia Kouvali (London). 05 June – 09 August 2025