Sandro Chia (Firenze 1946)

He was born in Florence but immediately experienced an international climate, making many trips to the East. Until the mid-1970s he committed himself to conceptual art and performance. From 1976 his work has a turning point and Chia returns to the concreteness of pictorial means and drawing. Extremely consistent figures are born, be they paintings or sculptures, figures that belong to and live in painting, melancholy characters, often suspended between heaven and earth. His colorful paintings have an expressive charge that has its roots in the Italian tradition. In the 1970s he experimented with a new painting flanked in the theoretical elaboration by Achille Bonito Oliva becoming a prominent name of the nascent Transavanguardia movement. During the eighties his work was exhibited in galleries and museums of international importance in Italy and abroad, up to the 88th exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Today he lives and works between New York and Montalcino.