Marco Di Lucca "Awkward Kiss"

Marco Di Lucca "Awkward Kiss" 2023

Sculpture, Marble
Dimensions: 16 x 17 x 6 inches
Unique
Signed on Verso

Marco Di Lucca is a marble sculptor based in Longmont, Colorado. Born in Italy in 1973, he spent thirty years as a visual effects artist, working on digital humans and characters for companies including Weta Digital, Industrial Light & Magic, Apple, and Nvidia.

In 2014, Di Lucca trained in marble carving in Carrara and Pietrasanta and began carving alongside his VFX work, drawn to a medium that could hold what digital work could not: weight, permanence, and the direct evidence of the hand. After a decade working across both disciplines, he left the digital industry in 2026 to pursue carving full-time. His practice centers on portraiture and the human face, working in Carrara and Colorado Yule marble with a realist, classically rooted approach.

Di Lucca is affiliated with the National Sculpture Society, the Society of Portrait Sculptors in the UK, and the American Artists Professional League.

Artist Statement: 

"Awkward Kiss is about the gap between an experience and how it's supposed to feel. A first kiss, or any first intimate contact, isn't always the release it's built up to be — it can be tense, uncertain, more endured than enjoyed. I wanted the piece to hold that discomfort rather than resolve it. Dreams work the same way: they don't give you the polished version of a desire, they give you the version still tangled up with anxiety, expectation, and everything that hasn't been worked out yet. The piece emerges from a mass of raw, unfinished stone for the same reason — it's not a memory being recalled cleanly, it's an experience still caught in the process of becoming something, the way a dream leaves you holding a feeling before it's had time to resolve into meaning." - Marco Di Lucca