Il Respiro del Cavallo

Horses appear regularly in Enzo Cucchi’s paintings and graphic work, often in a symbolic role. Here, the wavy, abstract cloud—the horse’s exhaled breath—intermingling with crosses set in a desolate landscape may allude to the rhythms of life and death. Cucchi intended the subject to be mysterious, to elicit a poetic response from the viewer. Cucchi was a pioneer of Neo-Expressionism, an artistic movement popular in Western Europe and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Neo-Expressionists emphasized nonconformity and experimentation, along with symbolism and mythic subjects.