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Paola Pivi (born 1971 in Milan, Italy) is an Italian multimedia artist,[1] based in Anchorage, Alaska in the United States.

Paola Pivi
Nationality	Italian
Website	www.paolapivi.com

This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information. (April 2022)

In her work, she uses a wide range of artistic techniques, including photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, video and performance.[2] Some of her works contain performance elements, at times involving live animals and people.[3][4][5][6][7] In 1999, she received the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale.[8] Her art is featured in public collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris,[9] and the MAXXI museum in Rome.[10]

Education

Pivi attended Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, during 1990–1995, and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, also in Milan, during 1995–1998. She has participated in residencies at the International Studio Program, Italian studio at MoMA PS1, New York from 1999 – 2000, and was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Italy in 2011.[2]

Selected works

Untitled (project for Echigo Tsumari), 2015

Untitled (project for Echigo Tsumari), 2015 was commissioned by Echigo-Tsumari for their 2015 Triennale in Japan.[12] The project was then displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence Italy.[13] As described by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi,

the staircase in the Palazzo Strozzi Courtyard is an object devoid of all practical function; outsize, unstable, temporary and out of context, it becomes the tool for an ascension which is no longer physical but metaphorical, dragging both the audience’s gaze and their emotions aloft. The whole palazzo becomes part of Paola Pivi’s transitory installation. Like an evocative and kaleidoscopic element of division, the monumental inflatable staircase clashes with the controlled and symmetrical perspective of the palazzo’s Renaissance architecture and with the measured and bland colours of the courtyard’s grey pietra serena stone and cream plaster. Paola Pivi delivers an emotional shock, producing a surreal event that breaks with the accepted conventions of space to generate new and unexpected meanings.[13]

48th Venice Biennale

Pivi’s Untitled (airplane) was part of the Italian pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, alongside Monica Bonvicini, Bruna Esposito, Luisa Lambri, and Grazia Toderi.[14] Her inverted Fiat G-91 airplane helped earn Italy the Golden Lion for best national participation.

[Untitled – Airplane], 1999, announces a blissful apocalypse in which objects come to life and upset the order of things: a menacing Fiat G-91 fighter plane is turned belly-up in defiance of the laws of physics and engineering, staging a radical reversal.[15]

Kunsthalle Basel – One cup of cappuccino

In January 2007, the Kunsthalle Basel exhibited several works by Pivi, including three works specifically created for the Kunsthalle, in her first solo exhibition in Switzerland entitled, It Just Keeps Getting Better.[16] Paramount among them,

’One cup of cappuccino, then I go’ consists of a cage, which spreads over two large rooms of the ground floor and is filled with 3000 cappuccino cups. A photograph of a leopard in the installation accompanies the work, which was taken before the opening the show to the public.[16]

Feathered Wheel series

In a video about Pivi’s exhibition ‘Paola Pivi. World Record’ at the MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy, curator Anne Palopoli said,

Pivi’s work activates different senses, it not only activates sight but also the sense of smell, even hearing. For example, the interaction with the wheels that are exhibited here. There is this movement and this sound or rather the absence of sound hat also involved the sense of hearing.”[17]

Feathered Bear Sculptures

Pivi is best known for her series of whimsical, feather-covered bears.

Sculpted from urethane foam and embellished with psychedelic plumage, Pivi’s carefully modelled figures are each accorded a distinct personality and body language. Together they create an enigmatic scene of Baroque excess and surreal desire recalling fables and fairytales, dreams and allegories in which unexpected forms become strangely familiar and the pleasure principle prevails. You started it … I finish it continues Pivi’s characteristic playfulness, interest in narrative, myth and rumour, and creation of indelible images that echo in the imagination. As with much of her work, the installation also invokes an animistic, spiritual wonder and deep concern about the vulnerability of the natural world. (…) Their playful poses and inquisitive yet nonchalant demeanour also remind us of human nature, as a means to understand ourselves.[18]

World Record

A gigantic expanse of mattresses covering more than 100 square metres, topped by another expanse, identical but overturned to create a padded cave, a narrow space for play or meditation into which the public is invited to climb… Whether they are colossal or minuscule pieces, the engaging works of Paola Pivi change the spirit of the place housing them and activate the senses of visitors, subverting the classical confines between public space and intimacy.” – Taken from a text on Paola Pivi’s exhibition ‘Paola Pivi. World Record’ at the MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy, curated by Hou Hanru, Anne Palopoli.[17]

Pivi says of the work:

As soon as I climbed in with other people, we all realized that we become a bit like animals in here, we lose our body language. Then I also realized that when visitors are inside this work, sometimes people who do not know each other begin to chat very amicably, as if barriers get broken (…) and it became like a white break from the news, from how the world is behaving right now”[17]

It’s a cocktail party

The Protikus in Frankfurt, Germany exhibited Pivi’s site specific artwork It’s a Cocktail Party in 2008.

Nine objects made of polished steel are on view, each consisting of 16-feet-tall pipe, a pump, and a basin. In each installation, a fluid is circulating continuously. The fluids – red wine, almond sirup, glycerine, black ink, olive oil, espresso, water, facial tonic, woodruff sirup – drop in one massive jet from the 5 inches pipes opening into the basin; given the extreme total height of the installation, they vigorously fall straight down with loud turbulence. The structure as a whole, then, is a rather impressive spatial installation, radiating massive power.”[19]

Pivi seeks to magnify^{[clarification needed]} her works as a means to

highlight absurd aspects of our everyday world, confronting the viewer with unanticipated and spectacular situations. Her works place well-known objects in unusual contexts, imparting to them a modified meaning and function, thus exhibiting cultural and social conventions.”[19]

Public installations

Grrr Jamming Squeak

When first opened in April 2010, Grr Jamming Squeak was described as an artwork that was

the first of its kind. It is a beautiful space in Rotterdam, open and free to everyone, it is a fully functional professional recording studio… and offers 100 one hour long recordings of 100 different animals, royalty free, and people who use the studio (for free) have to use one or more of these animals sounds within their music.”[20]

A public artwork commissioned by Sculpture International Rotterdam, the studio became an interactive and educational experience as well as a monthly concert venue for the city of Rotterdam from April 2010 to June 2011.[21]

How I roll

How I roll was commissioned in 2012 by the Public Art Fund in New York, to be displayed at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park. Inspired by the story of Constantine Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Leger marveling at a propeller at the 1912 Paris Air Show,

Pivi’s sculpture incorporates an entire six-seat plane that has been specially modified, enabling it to rotate through 360 degrees while held aloft on its wing tips. The artist’s transformation allows this Piper Seneca to be seen in an entirely new way. Airborne but flightless, its steady circular movement is mesmerizing."[22]

Untitled (zebras)

For the High Line, Pivi present[ed] one of her most iconic images, two zebras portrayed on a snowy mountaintop, standing under a deep blue, cloudless sky. This odd tableau questions the viewer’s notion of what is real and what is fake, while at the same time evoking the absolute freedom of making a foolish idea real. Unlike typical advertisements created with computer technology, Pivi’s photographs are all rigorously shot from life: each of her unconventional images is always carefully planned, staged, and photographed in real life.[23]

Exhibitions and awards

Exhibitions

Pivi has presented public installations at High Line New York, USA; and Public Art Fund, Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York, USA. Her solo exhibitions include major museums such as MAXXI, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, USA; DeFine Art Programme, SCAD, Savannah, USA; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas, USA; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy; FRAC Bourgogne, Bains du Nord, Dijon, France; Witte de With, Netherlands; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; and Tate Modern, London, UK. She has also been featured in galleries including Perrotin, New York, USA; Perrotin Tokyo, Japan; Galleria Massimo de Carlo, London, UK; Perrotin, Paris, France; Carlson Gallery, London, UK; and Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy. She has participated in group shows including at R & Company, New York, USA (forthcoming); Anchorage Museum, AK, USA; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA; Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; MCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA; and La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.[2]

Awards

• 1999, Golden Lion for best national participation, Venice Biennale, Italy[2]

Personal life

From 2013 until 2016, Pivi was based in India – together with her husband, the composer Karma Culture Brothers – because the adoption of their adoptive son from the Tibetan Children's Villages was obtained through a long legal dispute, which ended with the landmark judgment by the Delhi High Court CM(M) 579/2015,[24] which ratified the possibility for Tibetan children in India to be adopted as any other Indian child.

References

External links

• Official website

На других языках

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[de] Paola Pivi

Paola Pivi (* 1971 in Mailand) ist eine zeitgenössische italienische Künstlerin. Sie studierte Kerntechnik, bevor sie sich der Kunst zuwandte und die Accademia di Brera besuchte.

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- [en] Paola Pivi

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[fr] Paola Pivi

Paola Pivi (née le 10 mai 1971 à Milan, en Lombardie, Italie) est une artiste italienne contemporaine, qui vit et travaille à Anchorage, en Alaska[1].

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