Paola Pezzi

Paola Pezzi was born in Brescia on October 10, 1963. She lives and works in Milan.

In the early 1980s, she moved to Milan, where she attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and took courses taught by Zeno Birolli and Luciano Fabro, among others. At the invitation of Fabro and Jole De Sanna, in 1985 she participated with other emerging artists in an exhibition at the Casa degli Artisti in Milan, followed by significant group shows such as the Saatchi & Saatchi Prize at the Palazzo delle Stelline, also in Milan in 1988, which resulted in the acquisition of several works—now part of the renowned London collection—by Examples. New Italian Art at the Riverside Studios in London, and FABBRICA, organized by Massimo Minini in a disused industrial building on Via Apollonio in Brescia, both in 1989; or Imprevisto, curated by Luciano Pistoi at the Castello di Volpaia in Radda in Chianti in 1991.

Her first solo exhibition took place in 1990 at Franco Toselli’s Gallery in Milan, where, in addition to participating in numerous group shows, she also held solo exhibitions in 1991, 1994, 2004, and 2009.

Since the mid-1990s, Paola Pezzi’s career has been marked by significant milestones, such as her solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1995 and the acquisition of several of her works—not only by the National Gallery itself but also by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo—as well as her collaborations with galleries including Micheline Szwajcer in Antwerp, Victoria Miro in London, Simonis in Paris, Toselli, Ca’ di Fra, Cardi, and Galleria Blu in Milan; Massimo Minini in Brescia; G7 in Bologna; Dina Caròla in Naples; and Martano in Turin.

Her works are included in major collections such as: the Panza di Biumo Collection; the GNAM National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; the MAGA Museum of Art in Gallarate; the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, Gubbio; Palazzo Forti, Gallery of Modern Art, Verona; the Saatchi Collection, London; Banca Commerciale Italiana, Milan; Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, Milan; BNL Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Rome; and Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.

Among the numerous solo exhibitions held in recent years, the following are particularly noteworthy: those staged at the Italian Cultural Institute in Strasbourg in 2010; at Fabbri Contemporary Art in Milan in 2012; at the Italian Cultural Institute in Marseille and the Museum of Art and Woodturning in Pettenasco in 2013; at the Peccolo Gallery in Livorno in 2015; at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua and at the Art Loft Gallery in Brussels in 2017, 2019, and 2023; and at the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon in 2018.

In 2014, she participated in the group exhibition Objet perdu. Discorsi sul metodo at the Pino Pascali Museum Foundation in Polignano a Mare (Bari); in 2015, at the invitation of Bruno Corà, she took part in the International Conference and Exhibition Au rendez-vous des amis in Città di Castello, organized to mark the centenary of Alberto Burri’s birth. In the same year and in 2016, the large-scale installation Ridisegnare il mondo 2008-2009 was presented at Bocconi University in Milan, and in 2018, some of her works were exhibited as part of the Portofranco exhibition, curated by gallery owner Franco Toselli at the Palazzo della Triennale in Milan. In 2020, she participated in Maurizio Donzelli’s project Gesto 0 at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia; at the Cremona Violin Museum, curated by Ilaria Bignotti, ACME Art Lab, Giorgio Fasol, and Matteo Galbiati; in 2023 at Palazzo Martinengo, Brescia, for Una Generazione di Mezzo, in the exhibition Spellbound, a dual solo exhibition alongside Maurizio Donzelli, conceived by Albano Morandi, curated by Ilaria Bignotti, with text by Marco Tonelli.