Pier Paolo Calzolari

Pier Paolo Calzolari is an italian artist (born in Bologna in 1943) who was originally associated with Arte Povera. He is currently living in Lisbon (Portugal).

After spending most of his childhood in Venezia (Italy) where the cultural byzantine heritage and the singular light of the city over the water profoundly influenced his work, he moved in 1965 to Bologna at Palazzo Bentivoglio where he sets his studio. His first seminal pieces grow from his stay at the Palazzo where a lot of artists are hosted and showed (screenings with films by Ari Marcopoulos,Jonas Mekas,Andy Warhol...) Between 66 and 67 he works on his first performance piece entitled Il filtro e benvenuto all’angelo.

Between 1968-69, at the age 25, Pier Paolo, works in Urbino as an assistant at the Academy of Fine arts where he will be a teacher later in 2002-2003. In 1969, Pier Paolo also participates to the historical show When Attitudes become formscurated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern that probably marks the beginning of an international carrier. Among many others exhibitions, he is part of the Documenta 5 in 1972. Pier Paolo continues working intensively and while experimenting news pieces and exploring new medium, Pier Paolo starts a formal turn and creates his first frozen pieces.

Pier Paolo Calzolari’s first solo show in New York in 1988 was entitled When the dreamer dies, what happens to the dream?, infusing mundane substances with poetic presence. His works, some freestanding and some wall-hung, employ a variety of materials, either singly or in combination: corroded lead, burnt wood, scorched felt, moss, tobacco, oyster shells, a bathtub, a live white koi fish.

Sometimes Calzolari employs text: the show’s title sentence, for example, inscribed in reverse on a field of hardened salt. At other times, performance comes into play. Colibri (2002), an interactive video projection, features a reclining female nude with a hummingbird fluttering in the upper right portion of the screen.

Calzolari’s diverse production is held together by a series of recurring motifs such as variations on whiteness, frost, luminosity and corrosion. Even though the artist takes his materials from the quotidian world, there is little sense of popular culture.

Pier Paolo Calzolari is represented by the following galleries where he had several solo shows : Marianne Boesky, New York and Kamel Mennour, Paris. His last solo exhibition took place at galleryWhite Cube, London (2018). Nabeyrat (talk) 11:17, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

References

<ref>https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_Paolo_Calzolari

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