Luciano Massari

Luciano Massari was born in Carrara (1956) where he went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Carrara and Turin.
He began his artistic career in 1980, when he won a competition for his work Icarus Millenovecentottantaquattro in Trinidad and Tobago. He has participated in numerous exhibitions (individual and collective) and important international competitions. His works are exhibited in public and private collections in Italy and abroad.
Luciano Massari’s recent artistic production is the result of intense project-based research: this investigation lead to his creation of environmental pieces high in formal content, his focus on the intense dialogue between sculpture and poetry and his collaboration with other artists. Between 2002 and 2005,  together with Marco Nereo Rotelli, he expanded on the rapport between the visual arts and the written word through a series of artistic operations that witnessed the participation of Mario Luzi, Alda Merini, Fernanda Pivano e Maria Luisa Spaziani.
In May of 2004 Luciano Massari, guest of the Rapa Nui Foundation on Easter Island, produced a permanent scupture installation called 7 Verità on the site of Puna Pau: a substantial experience the outcome of which, not only thematic, embodied the essence of sculptural practice.
In 2005 he participated in the 51st Venice Biennial with his special project Isola della poesia, and in the Paris exhibition La Poesie Italienne comme oeuvre d’art (Italian Poetry as Work of Art) at the City Hall in the 5th Arrondissement. That same year his work Isola dell’identità  entered into the Gori Collection at Fattoria di Celle.
With the exhibition Archipelagos, a spectacular installation hosted in the summer of 2007 at the Fortezza Firmafede in Sarzana, Luciano Massari continued his reflection on the theme of the island through relationships between materials, the marble and the intellectual dimension of the journey as a time of confrontation with one’s own interiority.
In March 2008 he created the environmental installation Isola nell’isola in the Daniel Spoerri Foundation park in Seggiano (Grossetto) and in the summer exhibited the installation Archipelagos at the 13th International Biennial of Sculpture in Carrara,  Nient’altro che scultura-Nothing but sculture directed by Francesco Poli, in the section Sculture e installazioni per la città.
The most authoritative and respected art critics and curators have written about his work, including Mario De Micheli, Paolo Levi, Tommaso Paloscia, Ludovico Pratesi, Marisa Vescovo. He has been the subject of numerous articles in specialist publications, periodicals and newspapers, both nationally and internationally.
Luciano Massari has also been the subject of television programmes and documentaries. In 2005 he was profiled by France 3 in the themed transmission Des racines et des ailes. Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai (Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival)interviewed him in Tuscany Dream, a documentary filmed for China, and the director Dixson Tam presented his work on Hong Kong national television.