Mattia Barbieri

Brescia, 1985. Based in Milano and New York

With a strong technical ability and richness of elements, Mattia Barbieri’s painting reveals a style where everything unfolds on a single plane, within which disparate and heterogeneous elements are often arranged without apparent hierarchy. The composition, solid and at times virtuosic, gathers sediments from the collective imagination, the history of art, and popular culture, recombined in a new form. The pictorial elements, whether belonging to tradition or more daring visual neologisms, are used as words that make up a grammatical code employed by the artist to interact with painting as a language, through which everything is deconstructed, restructured, and reinterpreted. The surface of the paintings is sometimes animated by signs and engravings, and a very delicate line marks the distinction between the pictorial and sculptural forms, which the artist often uses as an alternative mode of expression.
Barbieri organizes his works into cycles and distinct series marked by technical innovations and iconographic forms, conceiving the potential of the painting practice as a multifaceted prism to rotate, observe, and translate. A graduate of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, since 2007 he has exhibited in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad. In 2010, he participated in the Moscow Biennale at the Winzavod Contemporary Art Center; in 2012, he won the First Painting Prize at the Lissone Museum; during Expo Milan 2015, he collaborated with the Città Ideale Project; in 2017 and 2019, he held solo shows at Pablo’s Birthday in New York. He was one of the winners of the Nocivelli Prize in 2020, and in 2022, he won the Icona Prize at ArtVerona. He has participated in international awards, residencies, and curatorial projects. He is a painting instructor at the Aldo Galli Academy of Fine Arts in Como. Since 2022, he has been represented by RizzutoGallery. He lives and works between Milan and New York.