Pietro Fortuna was born in Padua in 1950, lives and works between Rome and Brussels.

He studied architecture and philosophy and while still very young, he collaborated on important stage productions for the San Carlo in Naples, La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice. In 1977 he held his first solo exhibition at the Cannaviello Gallery in Rome, then in Milan from ‘78 to ’83 with other solo exhibitions at Luigi De Ambrogi, Luciano Inga-Pin and Massimo Minini and with his first solo exhibition in New York at Serra and Di Felice.

 

In the following years he exhibited at the 16th São Paulo Biennial, at the Pinacoteca Comunale di Ravenna with ‘Italiana: nuova immagine’ curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, and at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna di Bologna with ‘Anni “80” curated by Renato Barilli, then at the San Marino Modern Art Gallery and at the 12th Paris Biennial. Many exhibitions followed in national and international galleries and museums, such as the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York, the Otmar Triebold in Basel, the Montenay-Delsol in Paris, the Galleria Giuliana de Crescenzo in Rome, etc. In the 1990s he produced new cycles of works with installations and large-format works with which he was present in ‘Cadences’ curated by Pier Giovanni Castagnoli at the Museum of Modern Art in Caracas, the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires and the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota. He also exhibited at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in San Marino with ‘Italy-America, abstraction redefined’ curated by Demetrio Paparoni, then at the Pecci Museum in Prato in ‘Randevous des amies’ curated by Bruno Corà and ‘Work in progress’ at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna e di Roma.

 

From the same period, the various solo exhibitions include those at Hanna Feldman in Zurich, at the Nuova Pesa in Rome and at Le Carré Musée Bonnat, Bayonne. In 1996, as an emanation of his theories on the idea of community, he founded ‘Opera Paese’, a place where important figures in art, music, and thought meet, from Philip Glass to Jan Fabre, from Pistoletto to Carlo Sini, from Kounellis to Gija Kancheli. From 2000 to 2007, many personal exhibitions followed, including those at the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo in Todi, Nuova Pesa, the Stefania Miscetti studio and the Giacomo Guidi gallery in Rome. He also exhibited at ‘Matema’ at the Watertoren Centre for Contemporary Art in Vlissingen, at ‘Exempla II, arte Italiana nella vicenda europea 1960-2000’ curated by Bruno Corà, at the Pinacoteca Civica in Teramo and again at CAMEC-Centro per l'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in La Spezia with ‘Enclave 1’, then in 2006 at the ‘XII Biennale Internazionale della Scultura’ in Carrara.