Pivi creates artworks that are disorienting and simultaneously poetic. Though formally different, her work pushed the limit of what can be done in this world as an artwork. Her first comprehensive solo exhibition in the United States will take over both floors of the gallery and feature exclusive new works. On the ground floor, Pivi will present an installation of eight fantastic creatures. The polars bears will return in Paola’s art!
Nomadic by nature, Paola Pivi has lived all over the world, including Shanghai, the remote island of Alicudi in southern Italy, and Anchorage, Alaska. She is presently in India. Pivi first exhibited at Viafarini in Milan in 1995, the same year she enrolled in the Brera Academy of Art in Milan. In 1999, she was co-awarded the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion (Italy) at Harald Szeemann’s Venice Biennial. For this venue, which featured five Italian artists, Pivi presented “Untitled (airplane)”, an inverted Fiat G-91 airplane resting on its cockpit.
Last year, the artist was commissioned two original public artworks in New York City: “How I roll”, a project by Public Art Fund, a Piper Seneca airplane rotated on its wingtips, installed near Central Park at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, and “Untitled (zebras)”, a striking image of zebras on a snow-covered mountaintop on the 25-by-75-foot High Line Billboard at West 18th Street.
Like all of her photographs, this image is a live-action still, presented without digital intervention. Another of her iconic photographs, “Untitled (donkey)”, shows a lonely donkey on a boat floating in the Mediterranean Sea.

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