Archivio Conz

Eugenio Miccini was regarded as the original father of Italian visual poetry, an artistic stance characterized by the prominence of the image over the typographic text: Words and images, signs and figures are integrated and presented on the same semantic level. Miccini studied Pedagogy at the University of Florence, where he became notable among the city’s intellectual circles. He taught contemporary art history at the fine arts academies of Verona and Ravenna while also serving as an expert on semiotics at the School of Architecture of the University of Florence. Miccini collaborated with Silvio Ramat and Lamberto Pignotti on the leftist magazine Quartiere, which propagated an approach to “technical poetry,” as hypothesized by Pignotti. In 1963, he co-founded “Gruppo 70,” which brought together musicians, poets, and avant-garde artists under the new experiments of visual poetry. Several events were held in Florence in 1963 and 1964, emphasizing the relationships between art and communication, technology, mixed media operations, and interdisciplinary art. Close to these experiments, in 1969, he founded the magazine Tèchne, promoting publications of artists’ books and volumes of experimental theater. The Pain of Absence and Three Compositions (Einaudi, 1963) and Sonnet minor (Vallecchi, 1964) are among the poetry collections Miccini published during those years. Miccini worked with mixed media, creating collages with newspaper cutouts, such as Garden Puzzle (1977), and objects, such as Software (1979), a book made of fabric and wood in a Plexiglas box, both of which are part of the Conz collection. He also worked with Sarenco, contributing to the magazine Lotta Poetica and collaborating with the “Gruppo di Nove” in 1973. In 1983, he founded the international group “Locomotives,” which brought together poets from France, Belgium, and the United States. Throughout his life, Miccini wrote and published over seventy volumes of fiction and nonfiction. Miccini’s works can be found in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the BWA Museum in Lublin, as well as in galleries in Mantua, Bologna, Antwerp, and Tokyo, among others. His works were exhibited at four editions of the Biennale di Venezia (1972, 1980, 1986, 1993), as well as at the Quadriennale di Roma (1986), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1970), and the Palazzo Forti in Verona (1988).