PIERO PIZZI CANNELLA

November 20th, 1955
Born in Rocca di Papa, Italy

Italian painter who was among the young Italian artists of the 1970s who turned away from the hard-edged rigors and austerity of Conceptual art and in the 1980s were deemed part of the Nuova Scuola Romana (New Roman School) and the Roman Gruppo di San Lorenzo. After initially working in mixed media, he adopted painting. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he began a series of works that set objects such as dresses, stools, beds, doors and cathedrals against unspecified, non-descript backgrounds. The backgrounds were often scraped and reworked, the finished surfaces thick with paint and the objects stood alone. He is also well known for his geographical maps which he began painting during the first Gulf War to express his own views about the war. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the Museo d’arte contemporanea in Rome in 2006-2007. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, the Palazzo Reale in Milan and the Museum Moderner Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. He lives and works in Rome.