PAOLO MASI ©

PAOLO MASI

Paolo Masi was born in Florence in 1933. Since the 1950s he participated in the "artistic revolution" that the new trends alien to classical Figuration implemented in Florence. Paolo Masi, in that context, immediately stands out for his works, initially of an Informal and Abstract-Concrete kind and later (already in the 1960s) with a singular language characterized by a continuous experimentation on the way of operating and transforming matter, with a great variety of supports on which he intervenes and which he places in space: aluminum, mirrors, colored Plexiglas, packing cartons, stitched raw canvases... These were the years of major exhibitions in international galleries and of participation in the Venice Biennale (1978), the XI Quadriennale in Rome (1986), the Kunstlerbücher exhibitions in Frankfurt and Erwitert Photographie Wiener Secession in Vienna (1980); the Paris exhibition on the artist's book (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985), Arte in Toscana 1945-2000 and the exhibition Pittura Analitica. Italian Paths 1970-1980 (curated by Marco Meneguzzo, Museo della Permanente, Milan 2007). More recent works include those on surfaces of various types (packaging cardboard, wood, canvas, paper) on which the artist intervenes pictorially, but also plexiglass painted with spray acrylic, as in the series Trasparenze, begun in 2000 and also exhibited, as an installation, at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. Historic works by the artist are in the collections of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin, and the MART in Rovereto. He lives and works in Florence.