Michelangelo Penso
February 9 Through March 16 2007
Michelangelo Penso
(Venice 1964)
Michelangelo Penso was born in Venice in 1964, where he still lives and works. He has been exhibiting in private galleries and public institutions since 1981. After gaining a diploma from the Liceo Artistico Statale in 1983 and graduating from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in 1987, he taught at the Marseilles Académie de Beaux Arts and, since 1991, in Venice.
In 1993, he took part in the 61st Venice Biennale and exhibited in some of Italy´s leading galleries: Galleria Totem il Canale and Fioretto − Traghetto in Venice, the Galleria Continua at San Giminiano, the Galleria Via Farini in Milan. In 2004, he participated in the Nuit Blanche de Paris, creating an installation for the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. In December 2005, he held a one-man show in Lyons at the Vielliard & Fasciani art and architecture gallery.
In recent years, Penso has produced a series of works dedicated to the industrial area of Marghera, made using resins and transparent Plexiglas supports. The theme of vanitas that subtly appears in the works of the early 1990s is reproposed and rendered explicit in these latest ´Landscapes with ruins´. In his most recent work, signed Paernosmo, produced in collaboration with a computer programmer (David Mora), the original research into images from the past in art are combined with the post-catastrophe settings of the abandoned industrial areas.