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Luca Pignatelli (Milan, 1962) is an italian artist.

Biography
Luca Pignatelli was born on the 22nd of June, 1962 in Milan, where he still lives and works. Son of Ercole, an artist himself, after obtaining his high-school diploma, in the early Eighties he enters the Politecnico di Milano, attending the courses of Giorgio Grassi and Daniele Vitale. The Department of Architecture at that time was entrenched with the intuitions of Aldo Rossi and inspired by the concept of the sedimentary growth of History, which, for Pignatelli, will acquire a special relationship with painting, connecting the artist’s research on Time and Memory. Always aware of the changes that take place among the sceneries of art, painting and architecture, Pignatelli is capable of condensing them into a transversal historical reflection.

He is fascinated by the anonymous architectures of port cities, with their construction sites and movement of good, as well as the ones by Vignola, Loos and Mies van der Rohe, encountered during his travels across European cities, by Milan, native city and place of choice, along with New York, where he sojourns for long periods starting from 1986.

The City and the History of Art represent for the artist a sort of permanent setting to human events, but nonetheless a dimension wherewith Pignatelli engages his artistic research, operating analogies, as well as modifications. The artist is driven to visit warehouses, storage areas, military depots and large building sites, towards which he has always harbored a profound attraction and curiosity.

As a painter capable of facing the challenges posed by large scale works, Pignatelli normally utilizes recovered and unexpected supports, pictorial in themselves: canvases and tarpaulins, woods and irons, assembled papers onto which he operates applying his selection of images, icons of the collective memory taken from a kind of universally renown repertoire. His work explores images that are often finds of a lofty classical nature but also urban or mountain landscapes, sometimes trains, planes, symbolic elements, employed by the artist to construct and deconstruct a new evocative visual repertoire.