Nicola De Maria biography

Nicola De Maria is an Italian painter and artist. He was born in 1954 in Foglianise, in the province of Benevento. In the seventies, he moved to Turin where he graduated in medicine. After meeting Mario and Marisa Mertz, he decided to dedicate himself completely to his true passion, art.
In 1979, he was invited by the critic Achille Bonito Oliva to join the Transavanguardia, although his works would always be primarily inspired by abstractionism.
Nicola De Maria describes himself as 'one who writes a poem with fingers stained with color'. In fact, every painting or artwork ambientale is the transposition into vivid and bright colors of the artist's poetic vein.
The artist, with their works, aims to transcend the limits of the canvas to engage with the surrounding space. In fact, the artist almost never uses frames for their paintings and sometimes paints the edges and the back. Similarly, the sizes of the works range from small to large, and often their painting extends to entire environments.
Nicola De Maria exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980, 1988, and 1990, at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany in 1982, at the XVI São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1981, at the IV Sydney Biennale in Australia in 1982, and at the Rome Quadriennale in 2005 and 2012.