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Pietro Costa
Pietro Costa (born August 19, 1960) is an American-Italian visual artist from Sant'Arsenio, Campania, Italy. His work spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and site-specific installations employing a broad vocabulary that includes light, metals, fire, plastics, waxes, glass, words and blood.



Education
Pietro Costa moved to New York in 1972. He earned a Bachelor's degree from School of Visual Arts in 1982 and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College CUNY in 1987.

At the School of Visual Arts he trained with artists such as Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat."

Exhibitions and Career
Costa has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, in galleries and museums.

Selected exhibition history includes many New York galleries and museums such as the Penine Hart Gallery; the Stark Gallery; the Sculpture Center; the David Beitzel Gallery; the Bertrand Delacroix Gallery; the Martinez Gallery; the Win Kramarsky Collection; the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn; the Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art in Staten Island; two exhibitions at the Hudson River Museum; a site-specific commission at the Katonah Museum of Art in Upstate New York. He also exhibited at Savannah College of Art in Georgia; the Jessica Berwyn Gallery in Philadelphia; the Center for Contemporary Art in Miami, and others in the US.

In Italy, he has exhibited work at: Piano Nobile in Perugia; three exhibitions at Il Ponte Contemporanea in Rome; two exhibitions at the Certosa di San Lorenzo in Padula, one of which, titled Fresco Bosco – Ortus Artis, was curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 2022 his work "Ritratti" (or "Portraits" in English) was shown at the Museum of Palazzo Pretorio.

Pietro Costa’s work is a part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and exists in private collections in the US and Italy.

In 2019, Costa’s site-specific installation titled IN LIGHT OF IT ALL, exhibited light works and blood works contemporaneously, exploring his idea that we exist between two universes, the one inside our bodies and the one outside ourselves. This installation was part of an exhibition of works from the Museo MADRE collection titled – Parco dell’Arte Contemporanea at the Castello Macchiaroli, curated by Andrea Viliani.

Pietro Costa is most known for his Bloodworks series, which he has undertaken since the late 1980s. The series consists of portraits where the blood of the portrayed subject is used as a pigment between two sheets of mylar.



Press
Costa has been featured in several notable newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, La Nazione and La Repubblica.