Piero Golia Biography
Piero Golia was born in Naples in 1974. He is an artist with a very complex and pragmatic personality, and is considered a multifaceted provocateur with a neo-Dada imprint. He achieved great success internationally thanks to his performances pushed to the limits of reality and the use of irony to reveal the contradictions of contemporaneity. In 2001 he attracted the attention of the art world by arriving by canoe in Tirana for the Biennale. In 2005, he created a series of postcards for the Postcards from the Edge exhibition, after disappearing himself in New York. That same year, Goliath founded with E. Wesley The Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles, a free university that offered free training to young artists. The school was located in a bar in Chinatown.
Goliath is famous for his ability to use communicative codes and heterogeneous means, creating works that are true decompositions and recompositions of parts of reality, with dystonic and apparently devalued forms of meaning. Among his works we can mention the facade of a building in Amsterdam in "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" (2003), the borrowed and photocopied million dollars in "Two Million Dollars" (2006), the bus compressed by the walls of the exhibition space in "Untitled (Bus)", in 2008, or the luminous sphere of "Luminous Sphere on Top of the Standard Hotel" (2004-2010).
Among the exhibitions in which he participated, we can mention the Moscow Biennale of 2007 and the 55th Venice Biennale of 2013. Among his numerous solo exhibitions, we can highlight "Loser, Statements" organized on the occasion of Art Basel Miami in 2003, "Double Umble or the Awesome Twins" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2011, "Chalet Hollywood" in Los Angeles in 2013-14, "Chalet Dallas" at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2015-16, "French Academy at Villa Medici " in Rome in 2016 and "Piero Golia. The Painter" at the Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel in 2017.
