Gianfranco Meggiato is an Italian sculptor who was
born in Venice in 1963. He studied at the Istituto Statale d'Arte where he
learned how to work with stone, bronze, wood and ceramics. When he was 16 years
old he was invited for the first time to exhibit at the Galleria Comunale
Bevilacqua La Masa in Piazza San Marco. Since then he exhibited all over the
world, among the other at the Correr Museum in Venice and at the Senate
building in Milan; he made an installation on the Breath Building GEOX in
Milan; he was invited twice to show his works at the Venice Biennale; his Sfera
Enigma was presented to Prince Albert of Monaco and then installed at the port
of Monte Carlo; the Lu.C.C.A. Center of Contemporary Art invited him to
participate in the group show “Inquieto Novecento: Vedova, Vasarely, Christo,
Cattelan, Hirst e la genesi del terzo millennio”; he made the scenography for
the Opera "CARMEN".
Among the latest exhibitions we find: "Zyz Garden" (2019), in Matera,
on the occasion of Matera European Capital of Culture; "The Quantum Man:
there is no future without memory" (2021), in Agrigento, at The Valley of
the Temples, where the artist inserted contemporary art in an archaeological
context; "The Breath of Form" (2022), in Pisa, where his works were
located in various points of the historic centre and inside the Church of Santa
Maria della Spina; "The Encounter. Symbol of Peace" (2023), in Rome,
in Piazza Cavour, as a manifesto in favour of peace and the union of peoples,
against all forms of discrimination and war.
Thanks to this works he won the prestigious ICOMOS-UNESCO award "for
having masterfully combined ancient and contemporary in sculptural
installations of great evocative power and aesthetic value" twice, in 2017
and 2022.
For his artworks, Meggiato takes inspiration from the
great masters of the 20th century: from Brancusi for his quest for the
essential, from Moore for his conception of inside and outside relationship,
from Calder for openness to space
.
Starting
from these premises, he invented the concept of
“introsculpture”
,
for which the observer must not stop at the surface, but look at the inner
aspects of the sculpture. In this way his works appear as
mazes
in which men get lost in order to discover themselves and their inner spheres
.
“On a formal level space and light border the work, sliding over it as if it
were in-the-round; they penetrate inside it, wrapping its lattices and tangles,
reaching the point of illuminating the central sphere as the ideal point of
arrival.”
