Enzo CUCCHI (1949)

The market for contemporary art may be shrinking everywhere else, but in Italy both value and volume sales are booming. In the first half of 2003, Italy accounted for 5% of the market by value and 19.6% by volume, with 1,085 lots generating sales worth EUR 2.2 million.

The 1980s saw a resurgence of figurative painting in Europe with the German New Fauves, the French Figuration Libre movement and the Italian Transavanguardia that was quickly taken up by the art market at the time. But with Christie’s Rome holding its “Arte Moderna e Contemporanea” auction on 18 December 2002, how do collectors rate these recent Italian figurists today?