Luca Pignatelli

Luca Pignatelli was born on 22^nd June 1962 in Milan, in a house-workshop in which his father Ercole practiced as painter and sculptor. In the 80s, he consolidated his poetics visions by attending the lectures at the Architecture department, which were marked by the intuitions of Aldo Rossi who got it from very distant ages and spaces. Spurred by the idea of the sedimentary growth of History, painting, for Pignatelli, has a particular relationship with time: the combined presence of elements and shapes which are ascribable to different ages is not only dreamt but real and it lives within his work. He is driven to visit warehouses, storage areas, army depots and large engineering site. He is charmed by the mysteries hidden behind the anonymous architecture of port cities, with their yards and goods handling, but also by the architecture of the Parthenon, Vignola, Leon Battista Alberti, Loos and Mies van der Rohe, and that he has come across during his journeys through European cities. He is a painter able to challenge great dimensions and he usually works on anomalous supports but which are already pictorial ones, hemp tarps, planks and plates, assembled papers, overlapping the repertoire of his images, sort of personal catalogue in which there are mechanical means, ships, planes, metropolitan landscapes, but also reminiscences of the old through the remaining of statues and objects. Around mid 90s, the canvasses he has used are those of freight trains, running along the railways of Europe and which had been sewn again and patched up, because torn up by the continuous journeys but which suspend history and open lacerations for other trips towards art worlds. His poetics includes photography as an urgency to use the quote of other icons belonging to a golden past. The monumental sculptures of the Roman emperors, the chariots pulled by horses, out of their context and proposed again on canvasses worked with different techniques and solutions, become important parts of his iconography. The work of Luca Pignatelli has known wide appeal on an international level since the 90s.

HIS MOST RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS:

2015 Uffizi, Florence 2014 Museo Capodimonte, Naples 2014 Galleria M77, Milan – St Moritz 2011 Istituto Nazionale della Grafica, Rome 2010 Galleria Poggiali e Forconi, Florence 2009 MAMAC – Musèe d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice 2008 Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples 2007 Teatro India, Rome 2006 White Box – Annex Plus, New York 2006 Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, New York 2005 Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris 2004 Galerie Mudima Due, Berlin 2004 Generous Miracles Gallery, New York – Leighton House Museum, London.

SOME COLLECTIVE EXHIBITIONS:

2015 Fondazione Cini, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice 2015 Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin 2014 Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence 2014 Palazzo Chiablese, Turin 2010 Museo MAXXI, Rome 2009 53° Venice Biennale 2008 Musée Olympique, Shanghai, Lausanne 2007 Palazzo Reale, Milan 2006 MACRO, Rome 2003 50° Esposizione Internazionale d’arte, Venice 2003 Palais du Parlament Européen, Strasbourg 2002 Académie Royale de Belgique, Brussels 2000 PAC, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan 2000 Isetan Tokyo Museum, Tokyo 2000 International Forum, Tokyo 1997 Musée Nicolas Sursock, Beirut 1996 Musèe de Pully, Lausanne, XII Quadriennale, Rome.

Info: www.lucapignatelli.it