Luca Patella Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Luca Maria Patella was born in Rome in 1934 and has dedicated himself to artistic experimentation since the 1960s. He was one of the first European artists to explore multimedia, using different creative techniques such as photography, graphics, video and body gesture in his performances. Read the full biography

Luca Patella Biography

Luca Maria Patella was born in Rome in 1934 and has dedicated himself to artistic experimentation since the 1960s. He was one of the first European artists to explore multimedia, using different creative techniques such as photography, graphics, video and body gesture in his performances. His research has focused on the relationship between art and science, anthropological investigation and poetry. Patella used verbal language in all its expressive facets, to the point of breaking it down into its phonemes to show the multiplicity of its meanings.

In his long artistic career, Patella has participated in numerous solo and collective exhibitions around the world. In 1965 he held his first solo exhibition at the Teatro di via Belsiana in Rome. The following year he was invited to the Venice Biennale for the first time, where he exhibited in six other editions until 2011. He also participated in the Tokyo and Kyoto Biennale in 1966, the San Marino Biennale in 1967 and the Paris in 1968, where he won the photography prize.

Among the most important exhibitions in which he took part, we remember "Information" at the MoMA in New York in 1970, the solo exhibition "Luca Patella" at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo of São Paulo in 1982, "Duchamp und die Avant garde seit 1950" at Ludwig Museum in Cologne in 1988 and “End of Earth, Land Art to 1974" at MOCA in Los Angeles in 2011. In 2015 he exhibited the solo exhibition “Luca Maria Patella - Ambienti proiettivi animati, 1964-1984" at MACRO in Rome and in 2016 at the Tate Modern in London. Patella is considered a "total", autonomous and categorizable artist, who anticipated many artistic intuitions between Land Art, Behaviorism and Conceptualism.