Stefano Arienti

Stefano Arienti (Asola, 1961) lives and works in Milan. He graduated in Agriculture in Milan, then gained his artistic-cultural training attending Corrado Levi’s lessons at the Polytechnic, in a lively climate of seminars that included artists such as Richard Long, Daniel Buren, and Tony Cragg. His artistic journey began in the Eighties when, among his first works, he presented folded papers that exploited very simple and repetitive means and procedures which recalled everyday dynamics. In the subsequent decade, the artist works often using extra-pictorial materials, using reproductions of pictures by masters of the past or trite supermarket posters, covering them with malleable material such as plasticine or silicone. Arienti works are created by setting out from a conceptual gesture executed on an object which is thus taken out of its sphere of use and acquires an aura. In recent years Arienti has begun to create installation works and exhibitions, shifting analysis from the pure objective datum to the environmental dimension.His research proceeds along with guidelines of a relationship with popular tradition, which has always been one of his characteristics, but is completed by a backward glance at his own art and his own technical achievements, questioning himself on the capacity of art in a strict sense to influence culture in a broad sense.

He participated in many solo and group shows. The most recent ones include: CasaMadre Arte Contemporanea, Napoli (2020); Francesco Pantaleone, Palermo (2019); Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia (2010); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2007); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Lehmann Maupin, New York (2005); greengrassi, London;
MAXXI, Rome, (2004); Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, Turin (2001).