Sfera tentacolare

Gianfranco Meggiato was born on August 26, 1963 in Venice, where he studied stone, bronze, wood and ceramics sculpture at the Istituto Statale d’Arte. At the age of 16 and then 21, he was selected by the Municipality of Venice to exhibit his works at the Galleria Comunale Bevilacqua La Masa in San Marco Square, where he presented three culptures in Vicenza stone and semi-refractory clay. In his work, Meggiato gets inspiration from great masters of the 20th century: Brancusi for his pursuit of the essential, Moore for the inside-outside relationship in his culptures about maternity, Calder for the sense of space. Space, in fact, is a real element in Meggiato’s work and empty parts become just as important as full parts. The artist shapes his sculptures inspired by biomorphic tissue and the labyrinth, symbolizing the tortuous path of humanity looking for its essence, and revealing his recious soul. Meggiato thus invents the concept of “introsculpture” in which the observer point of view is drawn towards the inner part in the artwork, not only restricting on the surface. «On a formal level, space and light don’t define the work, sliding over it as if it were in-the-round; they indeed penetrate inside it, wrapping its lattices and tangles, reaching the central sphere point as as a quintessential point of arrival». Starting from 1998, Meggiato has taken part in many exhibitions and art fairs all over the world, including USA, Canada, Great Britain, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Principality of Monaco, Ukraine, Russia, India, China, Arab Emirates, Kuwait, South Korea, Singapore, Taipei, Australia. In February 2017 "GENESIS" solo exhibition - a retrospective with more than 50 artworks - was inaugurated at the Nuova Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice.