MEGGIATO

Gianfranco Meggiato was born on 26 August 1963 in Venice, where he studied sculpture in stone, bronze, wood and ceramics at the Istituto Statale d’Arte. Still very young, he was invited at the ages of 16 and 21 by the City of Venice to show work at the Galleria Comunale Bevilacqua La Masa on Piazza San Marco, where he presented tree sculptures in Vicenza stone and semi-refractory clay. In his work, Meggiato looks to the great masters of the 20th century: Brancusi for his pursuit of the essential, Moore for the inside-outside relationship in his works on the theme of maternity, Calder for openness to space. Space, in fact, enters the works and emptiness becomes just as important as fullness. The artist shapes his sculptures on the basis of biomorphic tissue and the labyrinth, which symbolizes the tortuous path of man bent on finding himself, and on revealing his precious inner sphere. Meggiato thus invents the concept of “introsculpture” in which the gaze of the observer is drawn towards the inner aspects of the work, no longer stopping short at the outer surface. “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 idea point of arrival.” Starting in 1998, Meggiato has taken part in many exhibitions and fairs all over the world , including USA, Canada, Great Britain, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Principality of Monaco, Ukraine, Russia, India, China, Arab Emirates, Kuwait, South Korea, Singapore, Taipei, Australia. In 2007 exhibited monumental sculptures at OPEN 10, Venice; In 2008 personal exhibition in: Museo degli Strumenti Musicali in Rome; Palazzo Senato in Milan; Museo Correr (Bibioteca Marciana) in Venice. In 2009 Exhibition of Monumental Sculptures “Plaza” Milan, 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In 2010: Installation of sculpture on the Breath Building GEOX, Milan; Personal exhibition at UBS BANK, Lugano. In 2011 and 2013 he was invited to show work at the Venice Biennale. In 2012, during Art Bre at Cap Martin, his Sfera Enigma with a height of 6 meters was presented to Prince Albert of Monaco and then installed at the port of Monte Carlo. In 2014: the Lu.C.C.A. Center of Contemporary Art held a solo show and invited him to participate in the group show “Inquieto Novecento: Vedova, Vasarely, Christo, Cattelan, Hirst e la genesi del terzo millennio”; Exhibition of Monumental Sculptures at Campanile di Michelangelo, Pietrasanta. In december 2016 exhibited a monumental sculpture Sfera Sirio diam. 2 meters in the Bayfront Park in Miami. In February 2017 a retrospective containing over 50 works was held at the monumental Misericordia complex in Venice; that same year, in June, the MARCA museum of Catanzaro presented a major exhibition on his work, in four of the most important locations in the city: MARCA, Scolacium, MUSMI and MARCA Open, with the “Garden of the Silent Muses,” an installation with a diameter of 20 meters containing 8 monumental works inside a labyrinth composed of 4000 burlap sandbags; Has made scenography for the Opera "CARMEN" Exhibit at Boca Raton Museum of Art. In October 2017, Gianfranco Meggiato receives the prestigious ICOMOS-UNESCO award "for having masterfully combined ancient and contemporary in sculptural installations of great evocative power and aesthetic value". In 2018 he was invited to show his installation site specific at Manifesta 12, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art.