Antonia Giosa

About

An exhibition of sculptures of the Italian artist will be exhibited in the UK for the first time.

Antonio Giosa is one of those artists who mostly works in a secluded and discreet manner. He is used mainly to exclusive settings (he debuted very young, in 1970, at the experimental pavillion of the 35th Biennale in Venice); after forty years of uninterrupted research, he will soon be showing some of his works in England for the first time.

The exhibition includes a selection of around thirty artworks which reveal Antonio Giosa’s unmistakable expressive register "consisting of signs, grooves, traces left on matter, on the rough porosities of terracotta, on the brightness of metals, on the rough surface of ancient woods manipulated by time, history and the weather; the relationship between these elements reflects the different facets of the same unified research approach which Giosa conducts starting from matter, its peculiarities and assembling, within the rhythmic sign-form semantics made of morphology codes which refer back one to the other, and of sedimented memories narrated in close symbiotic relationship" writes Silvia Arfelli in her introduction to the exhibition.

Antonio Giosa, born in the Basilicata region in 1951, studied with Alberto Viani at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice; in 1970 – when he was not even twenty years old – he was invited to the experimental pavilion of the XXXV^ Venice Biennale.  In  1971 he started teaching sculpture at the Istituto Statale d’Arte in Forlì; since 1973 he has exhibited individually and collectively, in Italy and abroad; in 2003, he sculpted a monument commissioned by U.N.M.S. for the “F. Agosto” City Park in Forlì, then donated to the Municipality. In 2007 he made a bronze cast for the church of S. Martino in Strada, in Forlì.

He has received numerous awards in the artistic field. His art is divided into signs, footprints, trace “negatives”, grooves and engravings which reveal the warp and hidden weft of his sculptures-structures-codes, in order to enable memory.

His art includes rhythmically modulated wooden steles, terracotta scrolls which, like ancient codices, unfold from virtual printing presses or copper engravings, pressed paper, remains of dream memories, finely chiselled surfaces, torsions and genesis. Nicola Miceli described his production as “constructive rationality” with an “experimental vocation”.