Piergiorgio Colombara Biography
Piergiorgio Colombara was born in Genoa in 1948, where he still lives and works. He attended the Barabino Art School and graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Genoa in 1974. In the 70s and early 80s he dedicated himself mainly to painting, but from the early 80s he devoted himself almost exclusively to sculpture. His works have been exhibited in personal exhibitions (the first in 1980 at the Balestrini Gallery in Albisola) and collective exhibitions (in particular at the Venice Biennale in 1993, 2009 and 2011) both in Italy and abroad. His research has been appreciated by art critics and historians, philosophers and musicians; his works are present in numerous public and private collections.
Colombara's works immerse us in a visual and sensorial experience that could be defined as the limit, the border, the ambiguous threshold between worlds and situations usually considered alternative. His works are characterized by an atmosphere that cannot be traced back to any direct reminiscence of reality or artistic results of the past - even if we could mention Fausto Melotti, and his desire to dematerialize sculpture and dissolve its volumes, and some results of Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, Germaine Richier. In Colombara's work there is a sense of lightness, suspension, fragility and transparency, a tension to grasp and shape the void and the uncertain border between sound and silence, something that brings to mind the levity dear to Italo Calvino.
His works escape the attribution of a specific time in the course of human civilization and the evolution of artistic expression: we are faced with fragments of something that we have already acquired, even if these fragments are often combined in the artist's operation of a real assembly, in a way that is not directly consequent to a linear logic that has assimilated the laws of the possible evolution of an object. The artist uses a combination of various materials (brass, copper, lead, aluminium, blown glass, wax, iron, bronze, ceramic, mirror fragments, strings, papier-mâché, photographic inserts) and inserts fragments of ancient artefacts, fragments of objects which, belonging to the history of human experience, were then shipwrecked or arrived there without being completely overwhelmed or disfigured by it. Colombara brings together in the body of his sculptures materials commonly classified as opposite and alternative, due to their relative characteristics of malleability and solidity; this further accentuates our perception of something that has come to subvert the rules of how things are done, causing a feeling of dizziness and alienation. His works are the combined result of two different tensions, one governed by a design vision, and the other by the emergence of a wind of freedom that blows during its formation into a work of art.
