MAXIMO PELLEGRINETTI
was born in 1960
He is currently a professor at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts (Milan), where for many years he was Director of the Sculpture Department and where he has taught since 1999 after having had other teaching positions at the Academies of Palermo, Macerata and Carrara. He currently holds the role of President of Magma Cultural Association. Since 1980 he has exhibited in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, his works can be found in private and public collections in Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan,Kazakistan, India and USA.
There are numerous participations as president and commissioner in the Academies of Fine Arts, in public competitions dedicated to the visual arts and in conferences on topics related to the valorization of culture and art. In recent years he has published a series of short stories such as Bestiario I (Him and the Animal) 2016 Meta Edizioni – Bestiario II (Animals among others) 2016 Meta Edizioni – “The parable of the stone” Prospero Editore 2018.
His work, always attentive to the contemporary art question and enriched by his continuous experiences abroad, is characterized by a strong spirit of research oriented towards versatile materials and stylistic solutions.
He lives and works in Milan and Pietrasanta.
In Massimo Pellegrinetti’s work, there is a kind of interruption in the evolution of the nature or style of matter itself, that leads to a redefinition of the image.
A harmonious representation, therefore beautiful, but also troubled by the artist, who decides deliberately to mark or censor some parts of his work, creates a focus on the absence of beauty, the lack, the violation compared to the work nature has created.
The tendency to beauty, can generate a form of super-fiction, of artificiality that also moves with the replacement between the real image and the photographic one, or creates it through the use of other elements that try to imitate the stone materials.
What emerges is a journey of discovery of the beauty within Contemporary Art, and at the same time an experience of It, as something that happens and offers to those who watch a new awareness.
Pellegrinetti creates his space through few signs, due to his experience as a sculptor, looking for the third dimension. It is a kind of beauty that can be found in many details and situations, that memory , imagination and experimentation can bring back to universal meaning, although with subjective standards or symbolic images that recur constantly as the house.
Despite agreeing with Hegel’s idea that defines the primacy of the spirit over matter, for the artist Pellegrinetti the idea, the thought, are not in opposition to matter, but on the contrary become the higher stage of it.
The whole range of Pellegrinetti’s latest works concerns the “essence of matter” in its being and appearing. It deals with an explicit and proclaimed awareness that changes the nature of recognition and identification, modifying expectations. The invisible becomes visible, what was hidden or forgotten, therefore becomes the centre of any aesthetic expectation
