Paolo Colombo, Luna Piccola (2021)
Watercolor on Arches paper, 31 x 23 cm
Baert Gallery is delighted to announce that Paolo Colombo’s piece, Luna Piccola (2021) is currently on view at the Hammer Museum as part of the exhibition Drawing Down the Moon, organized by Allegra Pesenti, former associate director and senior curator, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. The show runs between June 19 and September 11, 2022.
Paolo Colombo holds a special position within the art world as both a fascinating artist and an accomplished curator, a global career that started in the 1970s. Born in 1949 in Turin, Italy, he was the first European to exhibit at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, an institution that would soon become MoMA PS1, in 1977. In the mid-80s his focus shifted to art curation, initially as a research assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and soon after, working for the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Colombo would soon become the Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, where he worked from 1989 to 2000, and curated the 6th International Istanbul Biennial in 1998-99. Between 2001 and 2007, Colombo was the curator of the Museo Nazionale Delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI) in Rome. He has acted as an Art Advisor for the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, a curator for the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale, the 2nd Mardin Biennial, the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin, and the Iraqi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2007, Colombo returned to Athens, his adopted home base, resuming his work as an artist.
Working with watercolors and pencil, Colombo’s artistic work balances a simple pictorial language with a highly technical visual method. Word-based and image-focused works often incorporate Colombo’s own poetry and are illuminated through fundamental classical forms such as the dot, the line, and the square in order to construct a field of complex semiotic play.
