Piero Gilardi biography


Piero Gilardi pittore

Piero Gilardi was an Italian artist, born in Turin in 1942.
In 1963 he made his debut with the neo-Dadaist exhibition Macchine per il futuro at the L'Immagine Gallery in Turin. Two years later he created the Tappeti-Natura , works in expanded polyurethane through which the artist wants to denounce an increasingly artificial lifestyle that is increasingly distant from nature, typical of contemporary society. Starting from 1968, Piero Gilardi interrupted his artistic production to dedicate himself to political activity, while supporting the artistic movements of collective and spontaneous creativity.
He returned 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. Followed in 2000 by Not for sale for Mazzotta editore.
Starting in 1985, he began artistic research on new technologies through the development of the IXIANA Project which, presented at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, prefigures a technological park in which the public can experiment with digital technologies in an artistic sense.
Since 2002, Piero Gilardi has been working on the PAV – Parco Arte Vivente project which was inaugurated in Turin in 2008. In 2013 he created the exhibition there Piero Gilardi Recent works 2008-2013 which, as the title itself underlines, collects the works created by the Turin artist starting from the birth of the PAV. The exhibition aims to investigate the person of Piero Gilardi as a man in the world through all his artistic experiences carried out in the last five years and mostly relating to the Nature/Culture dialectic. Among the works on display, the series of drawings, chalk, pen and ink on paper, The observation of reality, created between 2011 and 2012, which reproduce glimpses of nature in places in the Turin countryside, very dear and known to the artist. Piero Gilardi dies in his hometown in 2023.