Piero Gilardi biography

Piero Gilardi was an Italian artist, born in Turin in 1942.
In 1963, he debuted with the neodadaist imprint exhibition Machines for the future at the Galleria L'Immagine in Turin. Two years later, he created the Nature Carpets, works in expanded polyurethane through which the artist wanted to denounce a lifestyle increasingly artificial and increasingly distant from nature, typical of contemporary society. Starting from 1968, Piero Gilardi interrupted artistic production to devote 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 path in a text entitled From art to life, from life to art, published in 1981. This was followed in 2000 by Not for sale for Mazzotta publisher.
Starting from 1985, he began an 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 where the public can artistically experiment with digital technologies.
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 Piero Gilardi Recent works 2008-2013 there, which, as the title itself emphasizes, collects the works made by the Turin artist since the birth of 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, mostly related to the Nature/Culture dialectic. Among the exhibited works, the series of drawings, chalks, pen and ink on paper, The observation of reality, made between 2011 and 2012, which reproduce glimpses of nature in the places of the Turin countryside, very dear and well known to the artist. Piero Gilardi died in his hometown in 2023.