Piero Gilardi

From the mid-60s until his death in 2023, Piero Gilardi has been making Nature-Carpets (halfway between painting and sculpture) a sign whereby his work can be recognized, an object of reflection for talking about a close and familiar nature.

Well before certain ecological challenges, which nowadays lie at the heart of our current world, Piero Gilardi has been concerned with representing nature not in the form of landscapes, but rather as fragments, not by way of a panoramic vision, but by adopting a horizontal way of looking at things, situated flush with things, in order to show us a nature caught in its smallest details, and attract our attention to things we would not otherwise look at. We are convinced that Piero Gilardi’s work and commitments are more relevant than ever...

The year 1969 saw the start of a lengthy activist and transcultural experience aimed at theoretical analysis, and the “Arte Vita” (Art Life) conjunction. As a political militant and an organizer of young culture, he undertook different experiments involving collective creativity in urban and “worldwide” peripheral areas, in Nicaragua and in Indian reservations in the United States, as well as in Africa. He resumed his artistic activities in the 1980s, producing interactive installations talking about our relation to nature and the world, offering visitors a chance to be part and parcel of the work.

Those proposals sought in particular to raise awareness about ecological challenges, making use of the contribution of technology and science in the art world; with Piotr Kowalski and Claude Faure, he was the co-founder of the association Ars Tecnica in Paris in 1988. In 2003, he created the PAV (Parco d’Arte Vivente) the City of Turin’s Park of Living Art project, which summed up all his experiences and experiments to do with the Nature-Culture dialectic. In 2012, his work was shown in a large travelling show (Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Nottingham Contemporary Art, Nottingham, UK). In 2017, the MAXXI in Rome held a retrospective exhibition, Piero Gilardi. Nature Forever, showing the various aspects of his work.