Gianfranco Meggiato

Gianfranco Meggiato was born on 26 August 1963 in Venice where he attended the State Institute of Art studying stone, bronze, wood, and ceramic sculpture. Invited at the age of 16 and 21 by the City of Venice, he exhibited three sculptures at the Bevilacqua La Masa Municipal Gallery in Piazza San Marco.

In his work, Meggiato looks at the great masters of the 900: Brancusi for his research into the essential, Moore for the internal-external relationship of his maternity, and Calder for the opening to the space of his works. Space, in fact, enters the works of Meggiato and the void becomes as important as the full.

The artist models his sculptures inspired by the biomorphic fabric and the labyrinth, which symbolizes the tortuous path of man in his search to find himself and reveal his own precious inner sphere. Meggiato thereby invents the concept of "introsculpture" in which the gaze of the observer is drawn towards the interiority of the work, not limiting itself only to external surfaces: "On a formal level, space and light do not delimit the work, sliding them around like a roundabout, but they penetrate inside, enveloping the lattices and tangles, and coming to illuminate the central sphere as the ideal point of arrival".

As of 1998, Meggiato began to take part in exhibitions and art fairs in Italy and abroad: USA, Canada, Great Britain, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Principality of Monaco, Ukraine, Russia, India, China, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, South Korea, Singapore, Taipei, and Australia.

Meggiato's most recent large scale works include "Quantum Man: There is no Future without Memory" in 2021, a large solo exhibition with monumental works set up in the Valley of Temples in Agrigento (Sicily), as an attempt to find a point of contact between archaeology, philosophy, and quantum physics. Then in 2022 he created "The Spiral of Life", set up for Prato City Council and the Pecci museum as a revival of the installation dedicated to the innocent victims of the mafia.

These installations earned the ICOMOS-UNESCO AWARD "for his masterful combination of the ancient and the contemporary in sculptural installations of imposing evocative power and aesthetic value".

2023 saw the unvieling of "The Meeting, Symbol of Peace'. Measuring 10 x 6 metres, this installation will stand in front of the imposing great Palace of Justice in Rome: made up of jute sacks, it depicts a kind of military fortification with a Silent Muse - a sculpture - as its heart: The Encoun- ter (4 metres high). The concept is based around the dozens of wars being fought all over the planet, and was unviled on the 24 February this year, reminding us that 12 months have already gone by since war broke out between Russia and Ukraine.