Piero Gilardi biography

Piero Gilardi was an Italian artist, born in Turin in 1942.
In 1963, he debuted with the neo-Dadaist exhibition Machines for the Future at the Galleria L'Immagine di Torino. Two years later, he created the Nature-Carpets, works in expanded polyurethane through which the artist aimed to denounce a lifestyle increasingly artificial and distant from nature, typical of contemporary society. Starting in 1968, Piero Gilardi ceased artistic production to devote himself to political activity, while still supporting the artistic movements of collective and spontaneous creativity.
He returns to artistic production in 1981, recounting his artistic-ideological journey in a text entitled From Art to Life, From Life to Art, published in 1981. This is followed in 2000 by Not for Sale for Mazzotta publisher.
Starting in 1985, an artistic research on new technologies began through the development of the IXIANA Project, which, presented at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, envisions a technological park where the public can artistically experiment with digital technologies.
Since 2002, Piero Gilardi has been working on the project of the PAV – Parco Arte Vivente, which was inaugurated in Turin in 2008. In 2013, he held the exhibition Piero Gilardi Recent works 2008-2013 there, which, as the title itself highlights, gathers the works created by the Turin artist since the inception of the PAV. The exhibition aims to explore the person of Piero Gilardi as a man in the world through all his artistic experiences realized in the last five years, mostly related to the Nature/Culture dialectic. Among the works exhibited is the series of drawings, chalk, pen, and ink on paper, The Observation of Reality, created between 2011 and 2012, which depict glimpses of nature in the places of the Turin countryside, very dear and well-known to the artist. Piero Gilardi passed away in his hometown in 2023.