ANDREA MORUCCHIO (Venice 1967) After receiving a degree in Political Science from the University of Padua, Andrea Morucchio began his photographic career in 1989. Since the end of the ’90s, he has expanded his own linguistic research – often based on considerations of a socio-political nature – in various directions, from SCULPTURE to INSTALLATION, from VIDEO to PHOTOGRAPHY, DIGITAL ART and lately NFT. In his dazzling career, Morucchio has practised the most diverse instruments and genres of contemporary artistic research, using the new media of visual communication in a prestigious way, adapting them each time to his own ideas and existential experiences. He has been able to see with new eyes, even managing to hybridise different languages into a magnificent material and expressive composite – through refined alchemy and mental subtleties: figures, sounds, gestures, words, but remaining, despite the variety of formal solutions, coherent with the instances of a thought of the image, of the image of nature and life, of things and the world, investigating with equal inexorable lucidity, both the recesses of the psyche and the dramas of existence.
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To approach Andrea Morucchio’s work means to enter into a somewhat disorienting proteiform creative dimension, which has formed itself along a vast horizon of investigation. In fact, for over a decade the artist has used the mediums of photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance in a continuous experimentation of expression, experience, and sense creation. If his first medium of choice was photography, since the end of the 1990s Morucchio has shifted to plumb the depths of the spatial implications of sculpture, beginning with the production of a series of works in glass and iron: BLADE (1999) and ENLIGHTENMENTS (2000) presented at his first solo exhibition DINAMICHe (Rossella Junck Gallery, Venice, 2000).
With the solo exhibition DINAMICHE, Andrea Morucchio — who until now had expressed himself exclusively through photography — makes his debut in the world of contemporary art. DINAMICHE is a purely aesthetic investigation into the nature of the material itself: glass. The rigorous and extreme forms he has created for this first solo show mark a break from traditional Murano glassmaking, even though he employs its most common techniques and glass types. By experimenting with the material’s inherent unpredictability — caused by various glass lifting and removal methods — Morucchio achieves an informal organic quality within rigid, geometric structures obtained through an exacting glass-grinding process. This approach reveals his intent to treat glass as a noble material in its own right, rather than as a mere imitation or a pretext for emotionless, predetermined results. As critic Andrea Pagnes notes, Morucchio’s relationship with glass is deeply intellectual: he explores its expressive potential as a sculptural medium, often combining it with iron to evoke ritualistic, almost sacred presences. The originality and strength of his work stem from a disciplined respect for the intrinsic nature of his materials, transforming objects into entities that seem to manifest their own inner essence.
For this exhibition project Morucchio created a video artwork, DYNAMO (2000) based on hundreds of photographs he took during the complex production phases of his sculptural works, both in the Murano furnace and the blacksmith’s workshop, set within various contexts. The scanned negatives and slides were digitally processed to create a unique video piece, accompanied by a specially composed soundtrack. This work fully embodies Morucchio’s creative hybridity, highlighting his abilities as a sculptor, photographer, and digital artist. DYNAMO showcases his expressive versatility, establishing a dialogue between his sculptures, photographs, and digital reinterpretation, and marks one of his first experiments in digital art.
The BLADE series marks Andrea Morucchio’s first artistic encounter with glass and the origin of his sculptural exploration into spiritual dynamism. His interest in the material arose from years of experience as a still-life photographer, documenting glass works by modern and contemporary artists and designers. Through this prolonged visual engagement, he gradually gave form to an image long present in his imagination:BLADE. The series consists of immobile glass blades that cut through space, embodying a dialogue between light and matter, fragility and precision, stillness and latent energy.BLADE acts as a clarifying image within Morucchio’s creative process—thought as light that pierces darkness, divides, and moves toward synthesis. As critic Andrea Pagnes observed, encountering these sculptures feels like “participating in a conversation with something coming from an abstract and remote distance—ineffable, mysterious, yet entirely contemporary.” the essential element that defines Morucchio’s aesthetic language, conferring on the object-sculpture an aura of clarity and spiritual intensity that transcends material experimentation.
In ENLIGHTENMENTS, the essence of the BLADE takes visual form in sharp glass points that pierce iron barriers, tracing horizontal lines and freezing a sense of continuous motion. Without relying on mechanical devices, these works convey a strong kinetic tension through the mere interaction of materials. By inserting glass tips into iron holes, Morucchio activates a contrast between fragility and strength, transparency and opacity, mobility and stasis. This dynamic opposition—central to his artistic language—generates a vibration that charges the sculpture with both physical and spiritual energy. Rooted in a deep understanding of glass and its expressive potential, ENLIGHTENMENTS reveals the artist’s ability to balance material precision with symbolic resonance.
In ENLIGHTENMENTS sculptures glass cuts through the density of metal, bringing light into darkness. Beyond their aesthetic investigation, they embody an ethical impulse—a desire for clarity, discernment, and liberation from confusion and heaviness. While the material tension recalls the sensibility of Arte Povera, Morucchio transforms raw matter into precise, disciplined forms that preserve rather than suppress its inner vitality. The result is a body of work that evokes archetypal, almost ritual images, charged with symbolic and spiritual resonance.
Shortly after creating his first sculptural works, Morucchio, driven by the expressive potential of glass, began developing new projects that deepened his exploration of the material’s formal and conceptual possibilities. The first of these is the WAVE series (2001), composed of curvilinear elements in ground glass whose extremities are inserted into vertical iron or steel structures. Although seemingly simple and almost two-dimensional, these immobilized, bent forms appear to “pulsate” with latent energy—frozen at the peak of movement, as if caught in a moment of dynamic tension. This reflection on balance and suspended motion would later evolve into ACCUMULO, where the dialogue between fragility and stability, order and tension, becomes the central focus of Morucchio’s sculptural language.
ACCUMULO (2002) is a series of sculptures made of ground-glass lances held together by a central rubber tube. Each element leans and rotates against the others, creating a fragile yet precise equilibrium sustained by tension and interdependence. The contrast between the brittle rigidity of glass and the elastic resilience of rubber defines the work’s physical and conceptual core. This interplay of opposing materials—rigid and soft, transparent and opaque—echoes Morucchio’s later explorations in ENLIGHTENMENTS and OFF SHOOTS, where glass confronts forged iron. In ACCUMULO, however, balance arises not through conflict but through a delicate cooperation of forces, capturing the instant when instability becomes structure and tension transforms into form.
HYPERBOLIZE (2002) is an installation project, originally developed only as a prototype in 2002. As in ACCUMULO, the piece quite literally “sustains itself” through a delicate balance of opposing forces. In HYPERBOLIZE, its stability — and very existence — depend on the precise contact of each curved glass element resting simultaneously on the horizontal and vertical planes. Composed of a sequence of curved, sandblasted crystal glass pieces shaped like a hyperbola, the work unites wall and floor in dynamic tension. The frosted glass captures and holds the light, creating the impression of luminous curves — subtle energies made visible, as in the environmental installation PERCER-VOIR (2003)— tracing a path of light between intersecting planes. Adapting to each new space, HYPERBOLIZE transforms with every installation, and can thus be described as a variable work.
Interest in a development of form and matter in space – clearly identifiable in the ENLIGHTENMENTS series – continues through the environmental interventions produced in 2002 at the Chiostri di San Pietro in Reggio Emilia, PERCER-VOIR n°1 and in 2003 in Australia IN OCCASION OF THE ART FESTIVAL TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hobart, PERCER-VOIR n°2. This installation seems to be the “environmental” evolution of the first sculptural attempts combined with an intensified search for a vaster sensorial and perceptive space that is always more interactive with the observer. The repeated choice of glass, characterizing this phase of the artist’s production, is determined by the specific properties of the material: transparency and the effects of dematerialization and dynamization caused by reflections.
In fact, the title PERCER-VOIR, playing on the terms perceive, pierce, and see, reintroduces the linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical need to open up new possibilities of perception, of understanding, and of discerning beyond visual, sensorial or intellectual habits. Thus, an investigation that tends to cross the most diverse forms of appearance or habit continues.
Inserting a series of crystal glass spikes into a field or onto the mirrored surface of a lake, the artist uses natural reflections of light – and of water – on the vitreous matter in order to generate new contexts of experience, developing the emotional and perceptive qualities of the substance, “opening” the observer’s field of vision to another experience of the space.
The use of critical, political and social languages precisely constitutes one of the main nodes of his eclectic practice: from references to terrorist-like “supreme sacrifices”, inherent in the audio-visual installation LE NOSTRE IDEE VINCERANNO (2002), produced aT Museo Mocenigo, to the light installation PULSE RED (2004), an alarm, at Punta della Dogana, Venice, warning against the risks of congestion of mass-media information, from the complex Australian multimedia work EIDETIC BUSH,(2003) to LAUDES REGIAE (2007) merging historical memory, spirituality, and socio-political reflection, resonating with the monastic austerity of a venetian Convent.
LE NOSTRE IDEE VINCERANNO / Our Ideas Will Win, Museo mocenigo, venice (2002) is a multimedia installation created for Gemine Muse, a national project inviting young artists to reinterpret works from Italian museums. In Venice, Morucchio selected La Battaglia Navale / The Naval Battle, which portrays Captain Zaccaria Mocenigo’s self-destruction—blowing up his own ship rather than surrendering. This glorified act of sacrifice gained new relevance in 2002, during the early days of the Second Palestinian Intifada, when suicide attacks dominated global attention. Morucchio’s reinterpretation exposes how narratives of martyrdom shift between heroism and fanaticism, depending on their historical and cultural framing.
Combining a double video projection with the original painting, transforming The figures of the crewmen from Mocenigo’s vessel, projected and hurled into the sea, into ghostlike silhouettes drifting across a field of lilies, evoking the endless cycle of war and sacrifice. The painting itself, bathed in cool blue light, is stripped of color and rendered hauntingly fragile. Excerpts from Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso—choral settings of farewell letters by anti-fascist partisans—fill the space. One letter, declaring “our ideas will win” inspired the title and appeared on red flyers scattered throughout the museum. By weaving together resistance, violence, and sacrifice, Morucchio invites viewers to reflect on the shifting rhetoric of martyrdom. Le nostre idee vinceranno is not merely an artwork to view, but an experience to inhabit—intellectually, emotionally, and politically.
As further proof of the artist’s eclecticism, shortly after creating LE NOSTRE IDEE VINCERANNO, Morucchio moved from the eighteenth-century atmosphere of the Venetian Museum to the fire-ravaged forests of Tasmania, where he conceived a new and remarkable multimedia installation, EIDETIC BUSH (2003), realized at plimsoll gallery, Hobart, Australia. The installation features two monumental 7×3 mt rear-projected screens, suspended in the gallery for a 360-degree immersive experience, evoking a spectral, metaphysical forest. Before entering, visitors see a wall-mounted slideshow of Morucchio’s performative acts in the bush, providing a contextual prelude that grounds the work in lived experience. morucchio touches on one of the region’s most pressing problems – the massive destruction of the wooded areas caused by the effects of global warming and the devastating practices of deforestation. Through their spectral chromatic abatement, the abandoned scenarios of the blazed woods of Tasmania become the sites of a complex process uniting performance and digital operations.
Morucchio’s interventions in the bush seem capable of reactivating the power of imagination. The marks engraved into the bark and the spirals of clay modeled on the burnt trunks appear like elements of a re-appropriation rite – a re-appropriation of the possibility of existing and imagining again. They present the possibility of “rewriting” one’s own existential perimeters in a space where combustion has cancelled out memory – thus, space and time – following a devastation which inevitably alludes to that inflicted – genocide – by Western people on the aborigine population, pillaged of the territory so inextricably linked to their culture, and therefore completely cancelled. In the video projections, the engraved or clay spirals combine with other digitally constructed ones, appearing and disappearing to the rhythm of venetian composer Luigi Nono’s Caminantes…Ayacucho.
Eidetic Bush combines immersive visuals with Luigi Nono’s haunting Caminantes… Ayacucho, a composition resonating with themes of Indigenous resistance, loss, and cultural memory. Choral passages drawn from Giordano Bruno’s De la causa, principio e uno evoke visionary and cosmological ideas, deepening the installation’s philosophical undercurrents. Nono’s soundscape alternates whispered pianissimi with sudden fortissimi, reflecting the emotional and temporal volatility of the work. Silence becomes a charged void, paralleling Morucchio’s burnt forest as a space of potential and vision. Through this fusion of image and sound, the installation creates a “shamanic” dimension where myth, memory, and perception merge, inviting viewers into a suspended, meditative realm where ancient spiritual impulses and contemporary artistic strategies converge. The observer truly seems to enter a mysterious eidetic space, where the “revolt” of a distant memory is reactivated and the first signs of a lost spirituality are rewritten. The ability to relate and dialogue with the preexisting – be it a place, a historical testimony or a work of art – is at the origin of the majority of Morucchio’s practice.
In September 2004, THE VENETIAN ARTIST realized PULSE RED, a public art intervention conceived for Progetto Borders and presented at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. Curated by Aurora Fonda and organized by A+A Gallery in collaboration with IUAV university, the project consisted of an intermittent red light projected onto the Golden Globe crowning the historic Dogana da Mar, generated by four synchronized spotlights. Through a minimal yet powerful gesture, Morucchio transformed one of Venice’s most iconic landmarks into a luminous signal visible across the San Marco Basin.
The golden sphere—historically emblematic of commerce and exchange—became a symbolic device, a kind of antenna that, as Francesca Colasante and the artist wrote in the catalogue text, “intercepts the electromagnetic signals of today’s communication flows and absorbs their intelligibility, reducing them to a simple flashing beam.” The red pulse of the Dogana thus became a metaphor for the implosion of the mass media system, a network on the verge of collapse where incessant transmission risks suffocating meaning itself. “Allegory, red alert, a system on the edge of collapse—the rhythm of relentless bombardment of information repeatedly questions the individual’s capacity to understand and filter messages,” write Colasante and Morucchio. PULSE RED is therefore both a warning and a reflection, a poetic and political gesture that subverts spectacle to restore awareness. A “tiny intervention of public art that resounds through architecture, history and the spirit of a place,” the work turns visibility into critical consciousness—an ephemeral yet resonant signal from the heart of Venice, calling for the urgent need to see, and to understand, anew.
As further evidence of Morucchio’s eclectic language and wide range of references and inspirations, since 2004 he has produced a pair of videos — one more documentary in nature and the other staged — both addressing urgent socio-political themes. At the core of Morucchio’s practice lie pressing social, ecological, and political issues, with video often serving as his most incisive and direct medium.
Sabato Italiano (2004) marks his first explicitly political work, a sharp response to the rise of Berlusconism in Italy, while Non aprite quella porta (2005) documents an activist occupation of the Magistrato alle Acque offices in protest against the construction of the MOSE project. TALK SHOW (2005) Originating from the Mars Pavilion experience, the video assembles a heated debate among artists and activists, and once again, a project curated by Morucchio has given rise to the short film of the same name, PETROLOGICHE (2003) and ARTE E MULTITUDO (PART A)(PART B) A conversation with toni negri (2004) produced with manuel frara and marco baravalle in occcasion of Mars Pavilion.
On several occasions, Morucchio has sought to channel his drive to address key social and political dynamics at the core of his practice through curatorial work. In this vein, he curated group projects as Petrologiche / oil logics (2003) and Mars Pavilion (2005), extending his artistic inquiry into a broader, collective context. Andrea Morucchio conceived and curated PETROLOGICHE / OIL LOGICS (Venice, February 19–24, 2004), an interdisciplinary project developed in collaboration with Interno 3, Galleria A+A, Laboratorio Morion, the City of Venice, and the Assemblea Permanente Contro il Rischio Chimico. Exceptional within Morucchio’s artistic path, this ambitious and complex collective initiative gathered a wide network of artists, performers, and activists to address — through contemporary artistic languages — the environmental and social consequences of the Petrolchimico industrial complex in Porto Marghera.
Through performances, video installations, and public interventions, Petrologiche transformed parts of the city of Venice during Carnival into a space for reflection and critical awareness, confronting the “oil logics” that intertwine economic power, political impunity, and ecological devastation.By engaging both local communities and an international audience, the project sought to reactivate civic consciousness around issues of industrial pollution and environmental justice. This demanding curatorial experience stands as a rare moment in which Morucchio extended his artistic practice into the collective sphere, using curation itself as a medium of social and political expression. Petrologiche remains a significant example of how contemporary art can operate as a catalyst for dialogue, resistance, and transformation within the public domain. From the video footage Morucchio recorded during the project’s various events, he later produced the short film PETROLOGICHE (PART A)(PART B) presented at the first edition of the Venice Film Meeting (2004)
One year after Petrologiche, Morucchio embarked on another ambitious curatorial experiment with Mars Pavilion – Artistic Resistance Laboratory, held at the Giardini di Castello Greenhouse and through urban interventions in Venice from June 8–12, 2005. Curated by Andrea Morucchio, Manuel Frara, and Marco Baravalle in collaboration with Laboratorio Morion, Global Project, and Radio Sherwood, the initiative took place parallel to the 51st Venice Biennale. Mars Pavilion presented itself as a hyper-pavilion—a collective, self-managed space of artistic and political convergence. More than a traditional exhibition, it functioned as an open laboratory where artists, activists, and cultural producers explored the intersections of art, society, and globalization. Rejecting institutional aesthetics and the elitism of official art circuits, it embraced occupation as both political strategy and social action.
Through performances, debates, community services, and interventions—including the now-famous “Martians” protest during the Biennale’s opening—the project questioned neoliberalism’s homogenizing forces and affirmed art’s potential as a tool of resistance and collective imagination. As described by Artforum, Mars Pavilion stood out not for its objects, but for its radical sincerity and commitment to local and global struggles—offering, in the heart of the Biennale, “the most genuine critical statement in Venice that year.”
FROM MARS PAVILION EXPERIENCE DERIVES THE VIDEO WORK TALK SHOW (2005) – Conceived for DIS-ORDER exhibition project at Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzo Tito, venice, Curated by Marco Baravalle – consists of the editing together of footage of a discussion amongst a group of activists and artists which took place within the Municipal Greenhouse of the Giardini of Castello, which had just several hours before been occupied and assigned as the operating and exhibiting base of the “artistic resistance workshop” MARS PAVILION (2004). TALK SHOW assembles footage recorded by morucchio of a heated debate among artists and activists sparked by Nemanja Cvijanović’s The Sweetest Dream, a European Union flag whose stars were rearranged into a swastika.
The video documents a raw moment of confrontation between political activism and artistic interpretation, dramatized through the spectral “Martian green” of its infrared imagery. Viewed today, the work resonates with a prophetic force, anticipating pressing issues such as censorship, restrictions on individual freedoms, escalating militarization, and the manipulation of public opinion through strategies of division and control. At the same time, TALK SHOW reflects the foundational spirit of the MARS PAVILION : the creation of a truly public space of encounter and dissent, where the tensions between art and activism can generate not only conflict but also new forms of collective imagination and critical awareness.
Created for the exhibition HOLLYWOOD. The Spectacle Factory (2005) at Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre —a project co-curated by Andrea Morucchio with Interno3— MORUCCHIO’S TRIPTYCH The Main Show (2005) marks a key moment in the artist’s career. Morucchio reactivates a series of black-and-white photographs GIPSOTECA (1994) taken at the Gipsoteca di Possagno. Printed from analog medium-format negatives, these images—rooted in his professional practice of the 1990s—are recontextualized as a contemporary artwork, transforming “pure photography” into a meditation on perception and the visual language of art.
The triptych presents three views of Antonio Canova’s Pietà, each from a slightly different angle. The work reflects on the persistence of sacred archetypes and their translation into the cinematic imaginaries of modernity. The plaster casts, marked by bronze reference points for measuring classical proportions, serve as metaphors for codification and beauty—an aesthetic framework from Neoclassical idealism to today’s spectacle culture. Morucchio illustrates how sacred imagery has shifted from cult value to media circulation while retaining emotional power. By reframing Canova’s Pietà within Hollywood’s spectacle, he reveals connections between devotion and cinema. A formal link to cinema emerges through subtle shifts in viewpoint among three images, creating a horizontal oscillation that engages the viewer’s gaze. This lateral movement echoes film’s illusion of motion from still frames but arises perceptually from the viewer’s act of looking. Through this, Morucchio disrupts the Pietà’s traditional stillness, reanimating it as a time-based image suspended between photography and cinema, devotion and spectacle.
In his photographic project Gipsoteca (1994) -from which the photographs used for the triptych The Main Show were taken- Morucchio explores sculptural form through a refined interplay of light and shadow that reveals both structural and emotional depth. Like a sequence in slow motion, the progressive variation between frames allows him to focus on the emotional and compositional “nodes” of Canova’s masterpieces—expressing despair, pain, complicity, and harmony in works such as the Pietà, Le Grazie, and Amore e Psiche stanti. Through a masterful use of perspective, Morucchio also creates subtle visual connections among the sculptures, binding them within an invisible web of silence and imperceptible dialogue.
A year later, the images of Canova’s bodies re-emerged as both inspiration and transformed protagonists in prints Emerging, (2006) which, together with the new sculptural series Offshoots, (2006) converge and interact within the exhibition project Emerging Code — a double solo exhibition presented at Despard Gallery, Hobart, and Galerie Rossella Junck, Berlin. These almost twin exhibitions mark a pivotal moment in Andrea Morucchio’s artistic practice, where his long-standing engagement with materiality, form, and the photographic image coalesces into a single, immersive vision.
Conceived as a dialogue between sculpture and photography, Emerging Code intertwines two interrelated bodies of work: Offshoots, a sculptural series composed of forged and perforated iron sheets filled with red-orange glass inserts, and Emerging, a sequence of digitally manipulated photographic prints on reflective silver film derived from Antonio Canova’s plaster models. The conceptual roots of the project trace back to a photographic series GIPSOTECA (1994) realized by Morucchio in 1994 at the Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno. Over the following decade, this early exploration matured into a broader reflection on the transition from classical figuration to contemporary abstraction. Through EMERGING CODE(A) & EMERGING CODE (B) Morucchio reinterprets Canova’s ideals not through imitation but through transfiguration, translating the sculptor’s search for proportion, harmony, and ideal beauty into a contemporary visual language grounded in matter and light.
In the Offshoots sculptures, the glass inserts become three-dimensional transpositions of Canova’s points de repère—the small bronze markers used to “encode” classical beauty and to transfer the exact proportions of plaster models into marble. These glowing glass modules act as both structure and metaphor: condensed sources of energy that pierce and illuminate the opaque iron surfaces, transforming solid matter into a vessel of pulsating luminosity.
The Emerging series (2006) on the other hand, translates analog photographic negatives from the 1990s into digitally reworked images, printed on reflective silver film. This marks Morucchio’s first exploration of digital art, a key moment in his evolution from analog process to digital manipulation. By merging tactile and virtual, mechanical and computational, the artist bridges centuries of artistic evolution—from Canova’s neoclassical perfection to the dematerialized aesthetics of the digital age. Exhibited together, the two series create an immersive environment where sculpture and image resonate in a play of reflection and transparency. The installation invites the viewer into a space of perceptual tension—between the visible and the invisible, the static and the dynamic—where beauty emerges not as fixed form but as a living process.
As art critic Marco Baravalle observes in his essay Sampling Canova (2006), EMERGING CODE(A) & EMERGING CODE (B) can be read along two intertwined trajectories. On one hand, it reflects Canova’s own passage from material to thought—a movement toward abstraction that Morucchio echoes through the interplay of plaster, iron, and glass. On the other, it embodies a contemporary postproduction practice, in which pre-existing materials and images are recombined to generate new meanings. Avoiding both nostalgic imitation and empty formalism, Morucchio situates his work in a lineage that runs from Canova to Lucio Fontana, using incision, light, and transparency as tools to reveal the inner vitality of matter itself.
The red torsos derived from Canova’s plaster figures evolve further in Sri Yantra (2008), where the torso depicted is the artist’s own. Through a performative action driven by the movement of his abdomen and chest, Morucchio turns his body into both medium and message. The single-shot video focuses on his red-toned torso, centered on a Sri Yantra symbol tattooed onto his skin. This ancient Hindu diagram—evoking the union of masculine and feminine, order and chaos—embodies the synthesis of opposites central to Morucchio’s practice. Here, it anchors the dialogue between the physical and the transcendental, acting at once as sacred geometry and personal mark. The torso’s movement follows a sound composition built from radically altered Tibetan mantras, producing a pulse that is both unsettling and meditative. Through these rhythmic expansions and contractions, the body becomes an elastic, ever-shifting surface. Anatomy dissolves, suggesting a return to primordial androgyny and a reconciliation of dualities through breath and motion.
SRI YANTRA, 2008, video – sound installation, Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone.
Created for the exhibition Notturni dannunziani – Man Between Eros and Nature (2008) at the Vittoriale degli Italiani, Sri Yantra engages directly with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s aesthetics. The piece echoes his vision of art as a fusion of sensuality, mysticism, and nature. By blending erotic and spiritual dimensions, Morucchio reflects D’Annunzio’s pursuit of unity between body and cosmos. The gesture—rooted in rhythm, vibration, and breath—embodies Eros as a vital force linking human and natural energies. The installation, featuring a looped rear-projected video and the accompanying sound piece tibetangranularsintesisritual by Alessandro Ragazzo, creates a meditative, immersive environment. Morucchio’s body becomes a catalyst in which movement, tattooed symbol, and rhythmic tension merge into a continuum between matter and energy, presence and transcendence.
ANDREA MORUCCHIO’S LAUDES REGIAE (2007) IS AN INSTALLATION THAT BRIDGES HISTORY, SPIRITUALITY, AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIO-POLITICAL THEMES. PRESENTED IN THE FORMER CONVENT OF SANTI COSMA E DAMIANO, THE WORK FEATURES 17 FROSTED BLOWN-GLASS HELMETS INSPIRED BY A 14TH-CENTURY SALLET, ALONG WITH PROJECTED IMAGERY OF THE WOLF OF PASSAU—AN EMBLEM FROM MEDIEVAL SWORDS—AND AN AUDIO TRACK OF THE LAUDES REGIAE, A LITURGICAL CHANT FROM THE 11TH CENTURY. THE INSTALLATION’S SETTING IS MINIMALIST, ILLUMINATED ONLY BY NATURAL LIGHT FILTERED THROUGH WHITE VEILS, CREATING A UNIFORM AND CONTEMPLATIVE ATMOSPHERE. MORUCCHIO EMPLOYS A REFINED AESTHETIC TO PROVOKE DEEP REFLECTION ON POWER AND ITS HISTORICAL MANIFESTATIONS.
The installation unfolds as “a visually austere, rigorous path of great formal purity,” where past and present, spirituality and secularism are tightly woven together. This minimalism heightens the symbolic force of the helmets—“red helmets that hieratically tear apart the hall”—transforming the space into a site where political and temporal power silently confront each other. The title Laudes Regiae refers to acclamatory prayers used during the coronation of rulers, designed to reinforce the divine legitimacy of sovereign authority. Historically, these chants were sung “to support the earthly power and supremacy of those who were appointed vicars,” exposing how spiritual ritual was mobilized to legitimize power rooted in very earthly interests. Drawing from Kantorowicz’s studies of medieval political theology, the work underscores how these mechanisms have not disappeared but continue to structure contemporary forms of authority.
GIORGIO AGAMBEN’S ANALYSIS OF GLORY AND PUBLIC ACCLAMATION FURTHER ILLUMINATES THIS CONTINUITY: MODERN POWER, LIKE ITS MEDIEVAL COUNTERPART, RELIES ON SPECTACLE, CONSENSUS, AND THEATER—NOW MAGNIFIED BY MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY. The installation channels this dynamic, revealing “the disturbing link between ancient history and contemporary politics.” This resonance extends to broader global tensions. Today’s geopolitical scenarios echo earlier intersections of spirituality, ideology, and violence: the critique observes how the rhetoric of justice and moral urgency can justify conflict, recalling that preventive war may “in many ways recall the Christian Crusades,” driven by forms of demagogy not unlike the acclamatory function of the Laudes themselves.
While several contemporary artists—such as Santiago Sierra with Los Anarquistas or Maurizio Cattelan with La Nona Ora—address these entanglements of power and ritual, Morucchio engages them through a dialogue with classical art and regional historical imagery. This approach elevates the work beyond direct political commentary: “It is the reference to classical works of art and historical imagery… which transforms his works into something beyond a pure criticism of the system.” Such a dialogue is central to Morucchio’s artistic language. Works like The Main Show or Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno similarly originate from moments of historical narration, reflecting on the persistent need for martyrs and the cyclical reappearance of ideological conflict. In Laudes Regiae, this perspective crystallizes in the projected figure of the Wolf of Passau—“the symbol of the ars bellica [that] continues running… an ideal link between what we were and what we still are.” Laudes Regiae shows how modern democracy remains deeply entangled with the dramaturgy of power. Through the interplay of ritual sound, historical symbols, and refined formal restraint, the installation exposes political authority as an ongoing performance in which acclamation, visibility, and spectacle continue to play decisive roles.
the audio-video projection VERSO IL PAESE DEI FUMI E DELLE URLA, produced by morucchio in Venice in 2008, commissioned by the City of Venice for Holocaust Memorial Day is made by Dozens of images of the symbols sewn onto clothing to mark Nazi concentration camp interns – Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, prostitutes, Communists – were projected onto the façade of a building in the heart of the city. The six-pointed stars and the different coloured isosceles triangle were reproduced in detail and assembled to recompose an atrocious atlas of the inhumane, of discrimination, and of violence, to the sound of passages from Nono’s Die Ermittlung.
Far from the black and white images of historical memory, this patchwork of cloth presents colours, embroideries and weaves that deceives. Appearing almost innocuous at first glance, they fascinate and intrigue, just as xenophobia and discrimination continue to exist and increase in appeal.
By coincidence, that same year morucchio once again engaged with a work of VIDEO public art, tracciati esistenziali / EXISTENTIAL PATHS (2008) Conceived for C_art. Artisti in Campo, the public art intervention featured a double video projection on the façades of two buildings overlooking Campo Santa Margherita. The work consists of blurred sequences depicting a continuous, cyclical motion—small dark forms rotating over a luminous background, converging around an empty center. At intervals, the images briefly sharpen, revealing the underlying system: ants, tirelessly moving in circles, a metaphor for our thoughtless, externally directed paths of existence.
Photography has remained a central medium in Morucchio’s artistic practice; since the 1990s, much of his work has developed from extended stays in Cuba, Nepal, and closer to home, where his ability to empathize deeply with different contexts allows his images to suggest narratives—real or imagined—beyond the single frame. His approach balances emotional engagement with formal rigor: a precise sense of composition, strong visual organization, and expressive use of color often lend his works an almost painterly quality, while never abandoning the essential photographic link to reality.
This vision reached a wide audience with his acclaimed solo exhibition CUBA Un Popolo Una Nazione / CUBA A People, A Nation (2008), presented at the Candiani Cultural Centre, MESTRE, which vividly portrayed the island’s complex and multifaceted daily life. Andrea Morucchio’s solo exhibition marked a milestone in both the artist’s career and the institution’s history. Produced by the Municipality of Venice and inaugurated by Mayor Massimo Cacciari, it was among the most visited exhibitions ever held at the Candiani and one of the largest solo projects realized there, featuring over eighty photographs displayed in the centre’s main gallery.
Drawing on a photographic reportage carried out in Cuba in the late 1990s, Morucchio portrayed the island’s social and cultural landscape with empathy and precision. As critic Alberto Zanchetta observed, the artist “avoids falling into stereotypes” and “eschews aesthetic traps,” instead revealing “the pure and simple joy of the children, the routine of work, the serenity of the people, the calm of daily life.” For Zanchetta, photography for Morucchio is “much more than a simple means of communication—it is an experiential practice,” a “participatory gaze” establishing “a transmission-relation with respect to the world.” Through this humble yet rigorous approach, Morucchio transcends reportage, transforming his Cuban imagery into “a psycho-geographic postcard” that captures “contradictions, dreams, and hopes,” and affirms photography as a space of encounter, empathy, and shared presence.
Since 2005, Morucchio has been invited to take part in various group exhibitions of contemporary art — though, somewhat unexpectedly, with purely photographic works, mostly reportage and Canova sculptures PORTRAITS, created before he began to devote himself to contemporary art. This is rather unusual, considering that by that time Morucchio had already developed a solid body of work explicitly situated within the field of contemporary art. Nevertheless, several curators chose to recontextualize his earlier documentary and sculpture photographs — such as those depicting life in Cuba or Nepal or Neoclassical sculptures “portraits”. — by presenting them in dialogue with contemporary artworks. On a couple of group exhibition occasions, Morucchio presented some Canovian shots: HOLLYWOOD. La Fabbrica dello Spettacolo / The Spectacle Factory (2005) Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre and ANTI-CORPI (2011) Torre Massimiliana, Venezia.
Within this curatorial framework, even Morucchio’s photojournalistic works transcend their original documentary purpose. They cease to operate merely as factual testimonies and instead unfold as complex visual constructs imbued with layered meanings and conceptual resonance. Detached from their initial temporal and geographical contexts, these images are re-situated within a broader artistic discourse that interrogates and redefines the porous boundaries between documentary practice and contemporary art.
This dynamic becomes particularly evident in a series of collective exhibitions of contemporary art in which Morucchio has participated, presenting photographic prints drawn from his substantial reportage projects on Nepal and Cuba, realized in the latter half of the 1990s AMONG THESE, THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EXHIBITIONS ARE: Open Space Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre (2006), abbiamo-fatto-bene-ad-uscire Villa di Toppo Florio, Udine (2007) anD MULTIVERSITY S.a.l.e. Docks, Venezia (2008).
On the occasion of Krossing, Forte Marghera, Mestre (2009) a collateral event of the 53rd Venice Biennale curated by Orsola Casagrande , Andrea Morucchio presented his photographic triptych Improvviso terrore mi sospende il fiato e allarga nella notte gli occhi / A sudden terror halts my breath and widens my eyes in the night. Inspired by a verse by Camillo Sbarbaro, the triptych captures the Havana seafront during a stormy night, where the sea shifts between water and mist, light and darkness, evoking a moment of suspended perception. As Marina Castrillo notes, “Andrea Morucchio is able to seize ambiguous paths of perception from well-known landscapes such as that along the Malecón – a nighttime picture postcard of Havana, a city of reddish earth, water and air daunting like spirits immersed in an ancestral fury.” In this visual spell — where sound, water, and silence merge — the world begins with the image and ends in the observer, turning Havana’s nightscape into a poetic meditation on vision and transformation.
With the same subject, reinterpreted as a diptych, Morucchio also took part in the following Biennale within the controversial exhibition project Lo Stato dell’Arte (2018) — a nationwide initiative of the Italian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Selected to represent the Veneto region, he exhibited the diptych at Villa Contarini. The curatorial concept behind the Veneto Pavilion, as part of the broader Italian Pavilion, focused on contemporary artistic production in Italy from 2001 to 2011.
At the same time, however, Morucchio has never abandoned his nature as a pure photographer. Over the following years, he continued to explore photography in its most direct and autonomous form, presenting a series of solo exhibitions devoted entirely to the medium. Among these, Cuba: Un Popolo, Una Nazione stands out as a project firmly rooted in the reportage tradition. Other exhibitions by Morucchio are devoted to urban and industrial landscape photography — beginning with his participation in the first edition of MIA Milan Image Art Fair (2011) and continuing, within the same thematic framework, through a series of group shows such as GLOCAL (2012) CANDIANI, MESTRE, Enjoy the Silence (2012) shots gallery, bergamo, ἘΚΛΕΚΤΙΚΌΣ / EKLEKTIKOS (2013) BAG Art photo gallery, Pesaro, IMMAGINE (2014) GALLERIA MICHELA RIZZO, VENEZIA, VenetianS Galleries & Photography (2015) CASA DEI TRE OCI, VENEZIA, RomA (2022) NOEMA GALLERY, Roma. This line of research culminated in the artist’s two solo exhibitions focused on the industrial landscape of Porto Marghera: PTM Project – Porto Marghera: Fermo Immagine (2017) MUPA Museo del Paesaggio, Torre di Mosto and L’estetica del tempo sospeso (2024) Docks Cantieri Cucchini, Venice.
In a number of other solo photography exhibitions, Morucchio blends the genres of reportage and landscape, resulting in Visually striking and eclectic exhibition setup — including Endless Journey (2013) Modern Gallery, stockholm, Ant(rop)ologica (2013) rossosegnale, milano, and I AM – Andrea Morucchio Fotografia (2016) Galleria talenti, portobuffolè.
EFFIMERO. Sistemi di contemporaneo (2009) invited a group of artists to reinterpret Bruno Munari’s Aconà Biconbì modular structure. Each artist received the same set of modules, transforming them into a unique site-specific installation temporarily placed in Piazza San Lorenzo, Vicenza. Andrea Morucchio’s “moon landing” took place there on July 20, 2009, with his installation DISCO MOON, created in homage to the 40th anniversary of the so-called “first landing on the Moon” — for those persuaded that it actually occurred. For Morucchio, that historic event belongs less to factual history than to the realm of collective imagination. His work thus became not a commemoration, but a reflection on belief, myth, and perception. Revisiting Munari’s Aconà Biconbì structure, Morucchio created a constellation of nineteen circular elements made of cardboard, wood, and photographic prints—moons set into silver discs and arranged radially across Piazza San Lorenzo.
Suggesting orbiting spheres, they reflected both the sky and the ornate façade of the adjacent temple, merging the cosmic and the earthly in a single luminous gesture. As the artist explains, DISCO MOON sought to trigger “iconographic short-circuits between Catholic and pagan symbols,” evoking the origins of religious sentiment while questioning humanity’s fascination with celestial forces and their supposed influence. More than a tribute to space exploration, DISCO MOON emerged as a meditation on the circle as a timeless symbol—at once cosmic and spiritual, Platonic and ritual. Here, it is not destiny inscribed by the heavens, but the presence of the passer-by that animates the work. Through reflection and movement, Morucchio transformed Piazza San Lorenzo into a sacred threshold, a temenos where art, belief, and perception converge.
PULSE RED (2009) is a video installation by Andrea Morucchio, conceived for OUTDOORS project and curated by Gaia Conti and Domitilla Musella. Installed in the courtyard of the Fontego dei Tedeschi in Venice, the work consists of four video monitors embedded in white wooden panels forming a glowing rectangular structure. Each monitor projects an arrhythmic red light, displaying footage from Morucchio’s PULSE RED (2004) earlier public intervention, thus linking past and present, ephemeral action and its reactivation within a new social and architectural context.
According to Conti and Musella, PULSE RED establishes direct communication between artist and public, functioning as a public art intervention rather than a mere installation. It operates as a “meta-piece,” where every visual element refers back to a specific creative moment; The work revisits Morucchio’s 2004 action at Punta della Dogana, where a red light beam was projected toward the golden globe atop the Dogana da Mar, symbolically questioning boundaries and media communication. PULSE RED was “reinterpreted” at the Fontego dei Tedeschi—then still the headquarters of Venice’s Central Post Office and soon to be closed for its conversion into a luxury shopping mall for tourists. As the last artistic intervention before this transformation, the work acquires a heightened socio-political resonance. The red pulse becomes an alarm signal, reflecting on the processes of privatization, touristification, and the broader cultural metamorphosis of Venice.
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Presented in September 2011 during the Venice Biennale, Back in Black stands as one of Andrea Morucchio’s most significant solo exhibitions. Hosted at Ca’ Pesaro – the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice – the show coincided with a major retrospective of Pier Paolo Calzolari, establishing a striking dialogue between contemporary visions. Conceived as an anthological overview of the artist’s first decade of practice, Back in Black gathered sculptures, prints, and videos under a single unifying principle: the color black. More than a chromatic choice, black functions as both material and metaphor—a conduit for exploring form, symbol, and meaning across sculpture, photography, installation, and performance.
As curator Stefania Portinari observes, quoting Saramago’s Blindness, “There always comes a moment when one has no option but to take a risk.” Morucchio, she writes, “is – to put it like AC/DC – Back in Black: back in his city with an anthological exhibition of sculptural works accompanied by a video representing a room of torture.” These “fetish-presences – ascetic and essential – move toward a ground zero of vision,” synthesizing the artist’s exploration of form in monochrome black. After photography and journeys to places “where black is the brilliant background – deep and unknown,” Morucchio returned to sculpture and installation, to what Portinari calls “an opaque and seductive black; polished; the almost medieval spirit of many of the works bordering on a menacingly defiant appearance and a fragility declared through the luminescent specificity of glass.”
This exhibition unfolds as a meditation on darkness as resistance and revelation. Works such as B[æ]d Time confront memory and violence, while Cross Shoots, Celate, Blade, and Accumulo explore fractured identity and the dual nature of glass as both weapon and wound. As Portinari notes, black here becomes “the absence of color, pure signifying form, infernal color but also magical, generating protean chaos from which everything originates.” In this sense, Back in Black operates as an alchemical passage: a return to matter, to darkness, to the origin of form itself.
Anticipating the turbulence of the coming decade—war, crisis, populism, ecological collapse, and media spectacle—Morucchio’s “return to black” reveals an artist attuned to the shadows of the contemporary. Its radical chromaticism resonates today with renewed urgency, inviting viewers to confront darkness not as void, but as the threshold of transformation.
A significant part of the works presented in the exhibition were created specifically for this project. Among the pieces featured in Back in Black, one of the most visually striking is the wall sculpture CROSS SHOOTS (2011) composed of black frosted and molded glass elements mounted on a wooden cross structure installed diagonally on the wall. Morucchio reinterprets this ancient and universal form as a reflection on the loss of direction and symbolic certainty in contemporary life. Rather than reaffirming the stability of the cross as a sacred symbol, Cross Shoots questions its meaning in a world where traditional points of reference have become unstable.
Also on display is B[æ]d Time, (2011) perfectly embodies the spirit of the project, in which black functions as both a material and a metaphor—an exploration of opacity, density, and psychological depth. The work’s ironically allusive title plays on the phonetic overlap between “bad” and “bed.” Composed of thirty-six black frosted glass tiles arranged in four rows and accompanied by a black velvet cushion, the piece uses the same pointed glass modules as Cross Shoots, transforming them into a metaphor for discomfort and fragile repose. As critic Daniele Capra observes, Morucchio overturns the traditional idea of the bed as a place of rest and intimacy, transforming it into “a site of passion, torment, and physical torture.” The seductive precision of the object conceals a latent unease, mirroring the overall tone of Back in Black—a reflection on darkness, vulnerability, and the instability of comfort in both material and existential terms.
Celata, a pre-existing work originally presented in fourteen red glass editions within the Laudes Regiae (2007) installation, has been chromatically revised and produced in black glass for the BACK IN BLACK exhibition. Displayed at Ca’ Pesaro as two opposing exemplars, the sculpture draws on the form of the 14th-century sparrow-beaked helmet (Elmo di Attila) from the Doge’s Palace Armoury. The black helmets evoke the archetype of the “black knight,” a figure symbolizing darkness, mystery, and ancestral fear. As Giovanni Bianchi notes, these knights “face each other boldly,” embodying a tension between two identical forces—an encounter that symbolizes the dialectic between the ego and its double. Concealed behind lowered visors, they recall Italo Calvino’s Non-Existent Knight, whose “voice came metallic from inside the closed helmet,” emphasizing presence through absence. Through their austere and essential form, the two blown and satin black glass helmets suspend the viewer in a state of primordial tension—a metaphor for cyclical recurrence, identity, and the perpetual confrontation of opposing forces transcending time and place.
CELATA series 02, 2009, blown, cast, frosted black glass, 44x35x30 cm
In December 2012, during the first Venice International Performance Art Week – Hybrid Body – Poetic Body at Palazzo Mora, Andrea Morucchio presented RIVOLUZIONI, a video installation curated by Andrea Pagnes and Verena Stenke. The work shows the artist rotating a polished glass rod, its rhythmic movement and sound projected out of sync on opposite walls. At the center of the room, the rod lies shattered and illuminated, surrounded by fragments, while Pagnes’ poetic text What is “evidence” in this word “revolution” scrolls on a vertical monitor. Originally created for Morucchio’s 2011 exhibition BACK IN BLACK, the video arose from his desire for a unifying gesture across a decade of diverse works. The simple circular motion of the glass rod embodies an ancestral, ritual movement, linking his artistic explorations of form, material, and instinct.
For the Venice International Performance Art Week, Morucchio reimagined the piece as a site-specific installation, transforming the isolated exhibition space into a multisensory environment where video, sound, text, and fragments interact. The inclusion of Pagnes’ poem adds a lyrical and rhythmic dimension, complementing the physicality of the gesture and reinforcing its conceptual resonance. As Stefania Portinari notes, the rotating rod “alludes to the cosmogonic spinning of the planets” and its cyclic shattering suggests an eternal return, a renewal emerging through the liberation of energy. RIVOLUZIONI thus becomes a meditation on creation and destruction, fragility and transformation, where a simple, instinctive act unfolds into a poetic reflection on the cycles of matter, time, and consciousness.
On September 11, 2012, during dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Andrea Morucchio presented EIDETIC BUSH (2012) at Space 42, Hauptbahnhof, invited by Critical Art Ensemble as part of the curatorial project Winning Hearts and Minds, which featured one hundred artists presenting daily interventions throughout the exhibition’s hundred days. The work reinterprets EIDETIC BUSH (2003) project first realized in 2003 at Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart inspired by the devastating bushfires that swept through Australia in 2002–03. In this new iteration, Morucchio combines digitally enhanced video of performative actions within the burnt landscape with Luigi Nono’s Caminantes…Ayacucho, a composition chosen for its visionary tension and its references to both the resistance of Ayacucho and the esoteric philosophy of Giordano Bruno. The choir performs excerpts from De la Causa, Principio et Uno, while the charred landscape becomes both stimulus and surface for ritual gestures—a site where destruction and creation intersect. Presented in the neutral, transitory environment of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof, the installation takes on a universal dimension: from a personal journey through Australia’s devastated terrains, it transforms into a collective document of memory, evoking loss, resistance, and the regenerative power of art.
Identity and otherness are two elements constantly at play in Andrea Morucchio’s work and the environmental context of site-specific work favours the plan itself and it’s conceptual nature. This is the case with PLAY GOD (2014) an installation produced by nuova icona and curated by vittorio urbani & elisa genna, created specifically for the Oratory of San Ludovico Church in Venice in May 2014, where the artist takes up some of the basic ideas of his artistic career and develops them inside the allure of a holy space that transmits a sense of mysticism. In PLAY GOD, Andrea Morucchio transforms the Oratorio into an immersive environment where sight, sound, scent, and movement converge into a contemplative ritual.
Two video projections mirror the artist’s body in rhythmic, repetitive motion, framed against a geometric black-and-white pattern inspired by Frank Stella. Between these visual poles, a patterned carpet, continuous wind-based sound, and the fragrance of bay leaf create a subtle network of correspondences, blurring the boundaries between body and space, presence and reflection, origin and echo. The work unfolds as a meditation on duality, circularity, and the act of creation itself. The cycle of six minutes of continuous sound followed by one minute of silence structures a ritual rhythm, while the symbolic references—from the sacred bay leaf to the carpet woven in a Tibetan refugee workshop—root the installation in personal and spiritual experience. PLAY GOD invites the viewer into a liminal space where geometry meets gesture, repetition meets stillness, and the human impulse to “play god” is reflected through the transformation of the sensorial world into a place of reflection, transcendence, and ritualized presence.
TERRE IN VISTA (since October 2014) is a site-specific installation by Morucchio at MUPA – Museo del Paesaggio, Torre di Mosto, Venice, consisting of eight panels displayed along the Museum façade. The work creates a suspended space where earth and sky meet and converse. Morucchio photographed the Boccafossa countryside through all seasons—plowed fields, grassy expanses, rows of plants, canals, and rivers — capturing both natural patterns and human geometries. As Giorgio Baldo notes: “An atlas of visual perceptions emerged. The land of Boccafossa is a landscape of geometric entities…Morucchio’s installation TERRE IN VISTA extracts spatial and chromatic ideas and transforms them into a suspended installation.”
Hundreds of images were cropped, mirrored, and recombined to form eight synthetic “earth portraits,” each an abstract yet photographic interpretation of the landscape. Together, they create a “flying carpet” of the earth, where geometric forms, colors, and textures rise to meet the sky: “The carpet flies over the earth, filtering its purity, decoration, and senses, offering them to contemplate the dome of the sky, like an inlay on the floor of a basilica.” Through this work, Morucchio transforms the Museum façade into a contemplative space of geometry, abstraction, and dialogue between nature and perception.
Again in 2014, Andrea Morucchio also participated in a group photography show on the theme of urban images in dialogue with contemporaneity. The show IMmAGINE, at the Michela Rizzo Gallery in Venice, brings together the viewpoints of several important photographers who investigate the landscape and contemporary architecture. Hamish Fulton, Mauro Ghiglione, Francesco Jodice and Andrea Morucchio show their personal visual journeys which wind their ways through places of their daily lives that move on to an exploration of the reality of environmental and industrial landscapes. For this exhibition project, Morucchio traces his itinerary through the outskirts and “no-progress” zones of the industrial area of Porto Marghera, Venice, presenting a triptych from his PTM Project series.
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THE RAPE OF VENICE is a large-scale multimedia installation by Andrea Morucchio, presented at the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice from June 5 to November 22, 2015, as part of MUVE Contemporaneo for the 56th Venice Biennale – All the World’s Futures. The project was curated by Vittorio Urbani (Nuova Icona) and Matteo Bertelè. It involved a multidisciplinary team including Francesco Gibaldi (sound design), Emanuele Basso (video), Maurizio Cerizza (Atelier Fragranze Milano, fragrance creation), Sebastiano Girardi Studio (graphic design), and We Exhibit (multimedia set-up).
Installed in the evocative White Room of Palazzo Mocenigo, the work immerses viewers in a total multisensory environment that reflects on the fragile identity of Venice — a city suspended between beauty and decay, heritage and exploitation. At the center of the installation lies an expansive floor composition made of thousands of printed tiles, a fragmented reinterpretation of the mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica. Once symbols of sacred and civic splendor, these deconstructed tesserae evoke the disintegration of the city’s cultural and material fabric. Walking across this precarious surface, visitors physically experience Venice’s own fragility. The soundscape, composed of underwater recordings from the Venetian lagoon, captures the deep resonance of boat propellers and engines — a sonic metaphor for the invasive traffic that endangers the lagoon’s ecosystem. Along the walls, video projections display continuously scrolling headlines from international media, flooding the room with light and information and situating Venice’s crisis within a global context.
The olfactory dimension, fills the space with the icy, seaweed-like scent of the lagoon, a subtle poetic counterpoint inspired by Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark. Through the interplay of visual, sonic, tactile, and olfactory media, Morucchio transforms perception into critical awareness. THE RAPE OF VENICE does not reproduce the city but translates its vulnerability into an immersive sensory and civic experience, merging protest and poetry. The work stands as a radical intervention within Venice’s contemporary cultural landscape, perfectly aligned with the spirit of the 2015 Biennale — an invitation to confront, through art, the fragile beauty and complex contradictions of the city itself.
Matteo Bertellè reads Andrea Morucchio’s The Rape of Venice as an immersive “total installation” that makes the viewer experience the city’s progressive disappearance. Echoing Joseph Brodsky’s warning about Venice’s ongoing “rape,” the work confronts both natural and human-made threats—climate change, depopulation, mass tourism, and environmental degradation—through a multisensory environment of fragmented images, text, sound, and fragrance. Drawing on Ilya Kabakov’s concept of the total installation, Morucchio transforms the Palazzo Mocenigo’s White Room into a space where Venice’s fragility becomes palpable. Instead of celebrating the city’s artistic treasures, the installation foregrounds the vulnerability of the city itself. Morucchio’s deconstruction and reassembly of the San Marco Basilica floor tiles create a sense of “estrangement,” while underwater sound recordings and multilingual textual projections challenge viewers to perceive Venice differently. Rather than replicating Venice—as global copies do—the work emphasizes its potential absence. Through this synesthetic reconstruction, The Rape of Venice crystallizes the fear of losing the city while simultaneously revealing its essence and urging a renewed responsibility toward its future.
Andrea Morucchio’s RED TRACK (2016) was presented at Palazzo Mora, Venice in 2016 as part of the third edition of the Venice International Performance Art Week, curated by VestAndPage and dedicated to the theme Fragile Body – Material Body. This participation marked Morucchio’s second appearance in the project, following his work RIVOLUZIONI at Palazzo Bembo in 2012. The installation revisits a performative action realized by the artist in Puglia in 2003.
In the video, projected vertically within a narrow space whose floor is covered with fine red powder, an African man walks under the blazing sun, dragging behind him a long jute sack filled with red earth. The friction of the sack leaves a continuous trace — the “red track” — marking his passage through the landscape. It is the red line that reconnects him to his native land like holy scripture with no words, as he moves forward, leaving behind all the exasperation and pain which his story recounts. Through this essential yet poignant gesture, Morucchio reflects on migration, displacement, and endurance, transforming a solitary action into a universal metaphor for human struggle and belonging. Combining image, space, and poetic symbolism, RED TRACK testifies to Morucchio’s continued engagement with the political and existential dimensions of the body as a site of meaning and memory.
MUPA, the Museum of Landscape in Torre di Mosto has hosted from 2013 various types of works by the Venetian artist in various prestigious group shows: TABULA RASA (2013) –DYNAMIC (2016) – FABULA INCROCI – including different media: digital art, sculpture, and since 2013 TERRE IN VISTA the permanent installation which surmounts the entrance to the Museum since 2014, and the solo photographic exhibition FERMO IMMAGINE (2017) ; “Pure” photography, in this case industrial photography, regularly returns to Morucchio’s research and artistic path. Between 2012 and 2017, Andrea Morucchio photographed the industrial landscape of Porto Marghera, on the edge of the Venice Lagoon.
His solo exhibition FERMO IMMAGINE, presented from October 28 to November 11, 2017 at the Museo del Paesaggio in Torre di Mosto (Venice), brings together a selection of these works, offering a contemplative journey through the transformation of a once vital industrial area. FERMO IMMAGINE transforms Porto Marghera into what critic Stefano Cecchetto describes as a space of “suspended time”—a landscape that seems to detach itself from reality to inhabit a metaphysical elsewhere. Through a painterly use of color, light, and shadow, Morucchio’s photographs transcend documentation to evoke emotion and reflection. They reveal a fragile, almost dreamlike vision of an industrial world on the verge of disappearance—a “quiet before the storm” where the visible becomes a gateway to the invisible.
Since 2016 Morucchio creates a series of digital works entitled PUZZLING RENAISSANCE composed of thousands photographic “tiles” reproducing parts of the mosaic flooring of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. The same tiles were used, randomly arranged by Morucchio, to create the flooring for the installation THE RAPE OF VENICE (2015) at Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo. In PUZZLING RENAISSANCE Project, Andrea Morucchio reinterprets the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance through fragments of geometric, vegetal, and animal motifs drawn from his photographs of the mosaic floors of St. Mark’s Basilica. By digitally reordering these patterns, the artist seeks a dialogue with the great painters of the past—Leonardo, Botticelli, Giorgione, and Titian—exploring how their legacy can resonate in contemporary visual language. Morucchio deconstructs iconic images into chromatic fragments, transforming them into delicate, pixelated compositions—shards of memory that reassemble after an imagined explosion. Within this process, the pixel becomes both medium and metaphor: a modern counterpart to the ancient tessera. Through this personal ars combinatoria, Morucchio fuses historical reference and digital experimentation, offering a refined meditation on time, memory, and the enduring power of images.
On the occasion of the solo exhibition PUZZLING, The IMAGE IS OTHER, ALSO (2019) at Galleria l’Occhio, Venezia, in collaboration with Bugno Art Gallery, Morucchio’s Puzzling Project is enriched with a new series of works entitled Puzzling warhol; instead of the tiles that reproduce the floor of the Basilica of San Marco the artist has collected thousands of images of butterfly wings that he uses to revisit a selection of works by Andy Warhol. The development of the Puzzling project in reinterpreting subjects of Renaissance pictorial art has stimulated Morucchio to expand the range of action by confronting the artistic movement which, since the end of the 1950s, has introduced a new figuration and first investigated the standardized and standardizing communication system of the nascent consumer society.
Engagement Acts is a video installation presented for the group show The Scent of Time in Venice in 2019 for the first edition of Majhi International Art Residency organized by DBF in collaboration with Lightbox and later in the same year in Dhaka supported by the Embassy of Italy for the 15th Italian La Giornata del Contemporaneo / Contemporary Art Day by AMACI. It consists of a series of videos documenting the artist’s actions created in a desolate, barren seascape; a specific alienating atmosphere from control shots, to significant contrasts and to a limited color spectrum. These are actions in which Morucchio interacts with the elements of this environment: tree trunks, rocks and sand; cathartic actions, liberating vent but also manifestations of an instinctual and primitive expression of creativity – rituality that over the years has characterized some of Morucchio’s installation projects. In 2024, Morucchio expands the project with ENGAGEMENT ACTS – STILLS, selecting frames from each performative action videos.
In 2024, Morucchio expands the project with ENGAGEMENT ACTS – STILLS, selecting frames from each performative action videos. Evolving from the initial video-based work,ENGAGEMENT ACTS – STILLS transforms moving images into still photographs that capture the essence of each performance. Each piece, presented as a horizontal sequence of nine photographic prints, freezes time to reveal moments of heightened intensity. With ENGAGEMENT ACTS – STILLS, Morucchio reexamines his enduring relationship with photography, exploring the boundary between motion and stillness and how meaning shifts when movement becomes image.
Venezia Anno Zero is a 13-minute short film by Andrea Morucchio, created during the 2020 spring lockdown and presented at the video space of Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. Filmed over two months when mass tourism came to a sudden halt, the work captures a profoundly transformed city — silent, deserted, and unexpectedly radiant. Composed from thirty hours of footage and accompanied by a soundtrack by Claudio Rocchetti, which blends original ambient sounds with new compositions, the film reveals a Venice suspended in time, rediscovering its metaphysical and dreamlike beauty. In continuity with earlier works such as Pulse Red (2004, 2009), and The Rape of Venice (2015), Morucchio reflects on the fragility and exploitation of his native city while envisioning the possibility of renewal. Awarded at the 17th Pasinetti Video Competition (Venice Film Festival, 2020), the project has since expanded to include photographic works as VAZ STILLS.
From November to January 2021 Morucchio participates in the exhibition Beyond the Face, the Contemporary portrait at the Art Centre Les Bernardes in Girona, Spain. The curator Laura Cornejo Brugés reserves an entire room for the works of the Puzzling WARHOL series, created especially for this exhibition, whose walls have been painted in relation to the colours of the works on display. For this occasion Morucchio also created a video Puzzling Pop video experience – in which the sound part created by the musician Leonardo di Angilla accompanies visitors to the exhibition. The exhibition brings together projects by four eclectic artists which with interdisciplinary languages approach in a core of works the genre of contemporary portraiture. Using citation and revisionist strategies, Morucchio operates on Andy Warhol’s famous portraits of media icons, using a digital collage technique – the juxtaposition of photographic fragments of butterfly wings – with which he deconstructs the morphology of the faces.
Re-Flooringis an extremely innovative and original project that lasts throughout the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. Starting from the mosaic floor of St. Mark’s Basilica Morucchio elaborates Re-Flooring a AR Augmented Reality site-specific NFT installation project in an evocative space, a church built in the early twentieth century in Romanic style no longer place of worship located on Isola delle Rose in the Venice Lagoon now the site of JW Marriott Venice. The work consists of nine printed panels hanging on the walls of the Church. The different images printed on the single panels reproduce the initial stills of the corresponding video animation. The nine different animations correspond to as many NFTs entitled Re-Flooring nft video. The work is experienced through the use of a free downloadable augmented reality app; the visitors by framing the panels with a smartphone “transform” them through Augmented Reality into monitors that transmit videos with relative sounds
With his solo exhibition PUZZLING IDENTITIES, presented at Bugno Art Gallery in Venice from June 10 to July 7, 2022, Andrea Morucchio offers a comprehensive overview of his ongoing PUZZLING PROJECT, here focused on the theme of portraiture. The exhibition brings together sixteen works from three interconnected series —Fantastic Portrait – Puzzling warhol – Puzzling Renaissance.For this exhibition, Morucchio has also developed interactive works that integrate digital and physical media. Through an app, visitors can access video and audio animations corresponding to NFT artworks directly connected to the tangible pieces. These NFTs (Puzzling Pop _ NFT _ video) were created using the same original photographs that Andy Warhol employed for his silkscreens, reimagined through Morucchio’s digital process. From the dreamlike metamorphoses of Fantastic Portrait to the mosaic-like Puzzling Renaissance and the innovative Puzzling Pop series, the exhibition explores identity, transformation, and the dialogue between image, material, and technology. 
Puzzling IdentitieS, 2022, Bugno Art Gallery, Venice
L’Estetica del Tempo Sospeso / The Aesthetics of Suspended Time presents a collection of twenty photographic prints, distinguished by their intense, evocative atmospheres—rich in warmth and shadow. In a dedicated space, the exhibition also features THE BEAUTY OF TIME SUSPENSION an audiovisual piece composed of a montage of hundreds of photographs of Porto Marghera, taken between 2009 and 2019. The video unfolds through thematic sequences, interwoven with poetic verses by Marina Castrillo and accompanied by original musical compositions from the UNFOLK Collective project. Porto Marghera emerges like a painting by De Chirico—a disorienting, desolate, almost psychoanalytic landscape. Andrea Morucchio, a Venetian by birth and heritage, rediscovers the concept of “landscape” within this industrial setting. From this vision, he conceived The Aesthetics of Suspended Time, a project spanning a decade (2009–2019), exhibited in 2024 Winter in Venice at docks cantieri cucchini.
In Spring 2024, to coincide with Morucchio’s solo exhibition The Puzzling Classics Show and the start of the 60th Venice Biennale, the Re-Flooring project is presented again in the spaces of Tesa 2 by _docks_cantieri_cucchini. On this occasion compared to the first installation of Re-Flooring the installation space is completely different; in 2020 in isola delle rose church the set of panels were conceived in order to create a ‘sitespecific installation. With Re-Flooring 2 we find ourselves in a space of a former boatyard and nevertheless the installation elements as a whole dialogue perfectly with this new context giving new meaning and artistic dignity to the repurposing of the multimedia work.
At just a few meters’ distance, Andrea Morucchio stages two closely related yet distinct projects: the multimedia installation Re-Flooring 2 and the solo exhibition The Puzzling Classics Show. Both are conceived using the same “material” — the digital photographic tiles of the mosaic floor of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice — yet they give rise to two profoundly different artistic operations that remain in dialogue with one another. Presented in the area adjacent to the Venice Biennale during the opening months of the 2024 edition, these projects highlight the conceptual and aesthetic coherence of Morucchio’s practice. In The Puzzling Classics Show, the artist employs the same mosaic fragments to create works from his Puzzling Renaissance series, digitally reimagining paintings by Tintoretto, Giampietrino, Titian, Palma the Elder, Veronese, Giorgione, and Leonardo. Through this digital collage process, Morucchio constructs a dialogue between classical art and contemporary visual language, extending the reflection begun with Re-Flooring project into a new, parallel dimension.
SAS Secret Apartment Show is an independent, site-specific exhibition curated by Vanya Balogh for the 2024 Venice Art Biennale. Hosted in a “secret” apartment facing the Biennale’s Arsenale entrance, it runs during both the opening (April 16-20) and closing (November 18-24) weeks. Featuring seven international artists, the exhibition explores biology, waste, violence, technology, displacement, media manipulation, and power politics, offering a surreal, thought-provoking experience in a transformed tourist apartment. For SAS, Andrea Morucchio debuted History Already Absolved Me, a digital collage portrait series crafted from butterfly wing fragments. This work builds on his Puzzling Pop project, which began with Puzzling Warhol in 2019. The first portrait, depicting Vladimir Putin, references Fidel Castro’s famous quote, “Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.” The artwork features Putin’s portrait alongside a brass plaque engraved with this phrase, all within an ornate black and gold classical frame. This neo-pop aesthetic contrasts with its solemn presentation, reinforcing the work’s critical stance on media narratives and political propaganda. Morucchio highlights how Western media has shaped perceptions through demonization and Russophobia, warning about the increasing control of information in modern democracies. History Already Absolved Me ultimately challenges viewers to question mainstream narratives, reflect on media influence, and recognize how history exposes manipulation over time.
A couple of Morucchio’s NFT projects, APOTI Making Faces and THE WEST SUICIDE —like History Already Absolved Me—stand in sharp opposition to the conventions of Western contemporary art environment, often aligned with globalist liberal power structures and mainstream narratives. In 2024, Morucchio’s NFT projects received international recognition with double nominations at the 3rd edition of the ftNFT YoCerebrum Awards, held in Malta on November 15, 2024. Morucchio was shortlisted in two categories: “Most Innovative NFT Collection” for APOTI – Making Faces and “Best Phygital Project” for THE WEST SUICIDE: Puzzling Lucrezia Romana. APOTI – Making Faces is a series of 33 animated NFT portraits, each constructed from intricate digital collages of butterfly wings. Through shifting facial expressions—anger, irony, laughter, embarrassment, surprise—the characters embody raw emotional reactions against the disinformation and cultural conditioning imposed by mainstream Western media and power systems. THE WEST SUICIDE: Puzzling Lucrezia Romana, part of the artist’s long-running Puzzling Renaissance series, reinterprets a 16th-century painting of Lucretia by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Transformed into a dynamic phygital work through Augmented Reality, the mosaic-like figure of Lucretia moves, her dagger finally striking, unleashing a flood of red tesserae. The piece becomes a powerful metaphor for the “suicide of the West”—a critique of political incompetence, cultural manipulation, and self-destructive geopolitical choices accelerating the civilization’s decline.
Between autumn 2024 and spring 2025, a selection of works from Andrea Morucchio’s Puzzling Renaissance series will be featured in two major events: the 4th International Fair for Modern and Contemporary Art Arte in Nuvola in Rome with Galleria Abscondita, and during the Milan Design Week 2025 within the project L’Appartamento at Palazzo Donizetti, curated by Artemest. The works—digital reinterpretations of Renaissance nudes—are composed of thousands of photographic tiles derived from the polychrome marble floors of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Through this technique, Morucchio fuses classical iconography with a fragmented visual language, evoking themes of identity, memory, and transformation. In Rome Galleria Abscondita presents Morucchio’s photomosaics in dialogue with a selection of glassworks by Vittorio Zecchin. Both artists draw inspiration from the Renaissance as a model of harmony and beauty, reinterpreting its principles in line with their own artistic sensibilities and the aesthetic needs of their time. In Milan, the works are integrated into the Entertainment Room designed by London-based studio 1508 London: an eclectic and immersive interior inspired by 19th-century salons and exclusive members’ clubs. Within this richly layered and narrative-driven setting, Morucchio’s Puzzling Classics function as both visual focal points and conceptual reflections, reinforcing the dialogue between contemporary art, design, and historical legacy.
Since summer 2025, the entire >> Fantastic Portraits series—part of the Puzzling Pop project—has been exhibited together for the first time in Venice, displayed in seven windows of a historic former shop, now Spazio Gabbiani, once home to Casanova and facing Marco Polo’s birthplace. Unlike traditional gallery shows, the portraits face outward into public space: some toward a bustling canal of gondolas, others onto a busy calle filled with global visitors. Their surreal gazes meet those of strangers, creating an unpredictable dialogue that transforms the display into a true form of public art, woven into Venice’s architecture, waterways, and cosmopolitan flow. Created in collaboration with Bugno Art Gallery, each portrait is composed of 63 photographic tiles made from butterfly wing fragments. This pared-down structure heightens distortion, producing figures charged with unsettling energy—echoes of Surrealist automatism. The distorted physiognomies resonate with today’s fragile climate, evoking anxiety and conflict while compelling viewers into fleeting, empathetic encounters. In this synergy of place, image, and humanity, >> this public art project becomes more than an exhibition: it is a mirror of collective fears and uncertainties, a public ritual of confrontation and catharsis that hints at an almost healing power of art.
On the 25th anniversary of his first solo exhibition Dinamiche (2000, Galleria Junck, Venice), Morucchio launches a groundbreaking new chapter of his Puzzling Classics project: Puzzling Tangible Classics. This series marks a decisive shift from digital, two-dimensional compositions to three-dimensional mosaics. Photographic fragments of the Basilica of San Marco’s mosaic flooring—first explored in The Rape of Venice project—are transmuted into physical glass paste tiles. The gaps are filled with gold-painted cotton threads or metallic acrylic, binding the fragments together in a luminous equilibrium. Hundreds of photographic “tiles,” once virtual, are reborn as tangible mosaic elements, inviting both visual and tactile engagement. The process mirrors a material metamorphosis: from ancient marble floor to digital image, from virtual fragment to physical mosaic. Puzzling Tangible Classics. blends historical mosaic tradition with digital experimentation, pushing the boundaries between image and object. By giving enduring form to ephemeral digital fragments, the series redefines the formal language of the project and inaugurates a new, mixed-media direction within Morucchio’s artistic practice.
