ARTIST

Pietro Fortuna was born in Padua in 1950. He presently lives between Brussels and Rome. He studied architecture and philosophy while he collaborated on important theatre sets for the San Carlo in Naples, La Scala in Milan and the Fenice in Venice. In 1977, he made his debut with a solo show in Rome at the Cannaviello Gallery, followed by other exhibitions in Milan at the galleries Luciano Inga-Pin and starts a long collaboration with Massimo Minini. In the early eighties, he exhibited at the  San Paolo Biennial, at the Paris Biennial, at the Künstlerhaus in Graz, at the Hildenin Taidemuseo in Tampere, at the Center National d’Art Contemporain Villa Arson in Nice, and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. From 1983 to 1986, he lived between Rome and New York where he made a series of works for Pack Bulding and later he began his collaboration with the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York. In the same years, he exhibited at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Calais, at the Galerie Triebold in Basel, at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, at the Galerie Montenay-Delsol in Paris and in Italy at the Quadriennale in Rome, at Villa Reale in Monza, and at the Studio Guenzani in Milan. In the nineties, his works were present in many museums, including the PMMK of Ostend, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, the Gallery of Modern Art in San Marino, and the Museum voor Sierkunst en Vormgeving in Ghent. In 1996, he founded Opera Paese in Rome, hosting and promoting exhibitions, concerts and meetings that left a mark in the city’s cultural history with important figures from the world of art and culture, such as Philip Glass, Jan Fabre, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis, Carlo Sini, Giya Kancheli, and Jan Vercruysse. In the same period he made numerous exhibitions in private galleries and public institutions such as the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, the Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the Pecci Museum in Prato, La Nuova Pesa Gallery in Rome and, in 2001, the Watertoren Center of Contemporary Art in Vlissingen. Other exhibitions in museums and public institutions followed between 2004 and 2010, including the Certosa di Padula, the Florencio De Lafuente Museum of Contemporary Art in Requena, the Morra Foundation in Naples and the Carrara Sculpture Biennial. In 2010 begins the Glory cycle at the Tramway in Glasgow, which foresaw the realization of monographic exhibitions that thematically cover the theoretical developments of the Artist’s work. The cycle continued in 2011 at the Macro Museum in Rome, followed by the Marca Museum in Catanzaro in 2012, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 2014, and the Macro Testaccio Museum in Rome in 2017.
During the same years he is present at the Museo CAMUSAC in Cassino, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, at the Museo Mambo in Bologna. In 2019 presents Novitas in Matera’s year as the European Capital of Culture.

Pietro Fortuna will be part of the KAD programme,in the context of Transeuropa.