Leonardo Pivi – Platonic love

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Gluck50 is located near Milan’s Central Railway Station, in via Gluck, one of the streets symbolizing the urban growth the city has experienced in the 1970s. Founded in 2013, Gluck50 is a private residence space for Italian and international artists, both established and emerging, who can express themselves in complete freedom, in order to create excellent art projects.
One of Gluck50’s main objectives is to promote, support and document the development of contemporary artistic talents, sharing and contributing to the creation of ambitious, original and complex art projects.
After Thiago Rocha Pitta and Yuki Kimura, from May 7 to July 26, 2014, Gluck50 presents Platonic Love, a solo exhibition of Leonardo Pivi (b. Cesena, 1965), the artist has specifically designed for the exhibition space during his residence in 2013.
For the occasion Pivi will exhibit a series of life-size marble statues sculpted and carved from plaster models, with the aim to retrieve formal classical models, where bizarre and personal typologies coexist and come to life showing a strong spatial vitality The artist’s intervention aided and abetted by his studies on light has the ambition to update the concept of classical and neo-classical beauty of the human body in the third millennium.

Caught in an attitude between the obscene and the provocative, Pivi’s characters evoke a variety of inspirational models such as an ideal and deified concept of beauty and religiously-shaped bodies that refer to the gods without preventing more contemporary references such as inflatable dolls and crash test dummies, giving a new look to marble’s cold nature and bringing back the attention to the human body and the values associated with it such as monumentality, dynamism, twisting and movement .
Ranging from current events to topics considered cornerstones of existential anguish, Pivi investigates new possible poetic and expressive patterns using beauty as a restoring and comforting force.

Biography
Leonardo Pivi was born in Cesena, Italy, in 1965.
He lives in Milan and Riccione.

Pivi attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna where he graduated with a degree in painting in 1988.

In the early 1990s he started makinghis first small-size sculptural installations, The most significant exhibitions featuring this body of work are "Soul eats Soul", Neon Gallery, Bologna, 1992 (curated by Roberto Daolio) and “Act of Worship", Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva, 1994 (curated by Gianni Romano).
His most recent solo exhibitions include "Foreign Body" Astuni Gallery Bologna, 2004 (curated by Luca Beatrice and Marco Senaldi) "Upload" Marena Gallery, Turin, 2004 (curated by Guido Curto), "Scorched Earth" FAR Museum, Rimini, 2013 (curated by Marco Senaldi).
Group exhibitions include "Vingt pièces fragiles", Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva, 1992 (curated by Gianni Romano); “Premio Marche 1993” (curated by Renato Barilli); "Art Tour of Italy", L’Attico/Sargentini, Rome, 1997 (curated by Roberto Daolio), "Figuration Defiguration", Galleria Civica, Bolzano, 1999 (curated by Letizia Ragaglia); "Cover Theory", Officina della Luce, Piacenza, 2003 (curated by Marco Senaldi ); "Generational", Basilica of Palladio, Vicenza, 2003 (curated by Beatrice Buscaroli); "Marble to Celluloide", Parco e Villa La Versiliana, Marina di Pietrasanta, 2006 (curated by Marco Senaldi); and the 13rd Biennale of Sculpture, Carrara, 2007 (curated by Francesco Poli).

Milan, March 2014