Works

Biography

He was born in Taranto in 1997, a city he left at a very young age first to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and then at the IUAV in Venice; he now lives in Milan, where he has a studio shared with other artists. 

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Since 2020 Lorenzo has been a member of the multidisciplinary collective Friche, while since January 2022 he has been a resident artist at Viafarini's studios in Milan. In 2021, he participated in the exhibition What the Fuck Is Prosperity from A plus a, curated by Curatorial School in Venice and, the following year, he was invited to the exhibitions Salon def refusés, curated by Metareale, at Spazio Canonica in Milan, Visioni (s)velate at Viafarini, curated by Elena Bray, E ci fa dispetto il tempo, at Sottofondo Studio in Arezzo, curated by Elena Castiglia, Abitare lo spazio,as part of the Giudecca Arts Festival, curated by Giulia del Gobbo, Monumento in the calendar of Bolzano Art Weeks curated by Nina Stricker, ReA! Art Fair at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, while last September was his solo exhibition at Casavuota in Rome, curated by Francesco Paolo Del Re and Sabino De Nichilo, where the complexity of his work emerged in depth.

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Montinaro reflects on the theme of memory. To do so, in recent years he has chosen as his starting point the old tombstones recovered by marble workers near cemeteries: he takes them - they are the ones destined to be forgotten, because they concern bodies already transferred elsewhere or to the cemetery ossuary - and erases part of the inscriptions with a slow and ritualistic chiselling work in the studio. Sometimes he saves individual letters that, associated with each other on the marble surface, compose paradigmatic words or veritable epitaphs. "I already knew that I would have been an artist or a juggler when I was a child," he tells me, as many books are piled up on his table, including Cedi la strada agli alberi by Franco Arminio, Canzoniere della morte by the Salento poet Salvatore Toma - an extraordinary name not surprisingly loved by Maria Corti, who published it for Einaudi - and Morte e pianto rituale by Ernesto De Martino.