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Pier Paolo Calzolari is an Italian artist (born in Bologna in 1943) who was originally associated with Arte Povera. He currently lives in Lisbon (Portugal).

After spending most of his childhood in Venice, Italy where the cultural Byzantine heritage and the singular light of the city over the water profoundly influenced his work. He moved in 1965 to Bologna at Studio Bentivoglio where he set up his studio. His first seminal pieces grew from his stay at the Palazzo where a lot of artists are hosted and showed (screenings with films by Ari Marcopoulos,Jonas Mekas,Andy Warhol...) Between 66 and 67 he works on his first performance piece entitled Il filtro e benvenuto all’angelo.

Between 1968-69, at the age 25, Pier Paolo, worked in Urbino as an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts where he became a teacher later in 2002-2003. In 1969, Pier Paolo also participated in the historical show Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (also included were Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, and Eva Hesse among others) curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern that marked the beginning of an international career. Among many others exhibitions, he was part of the Documenta 5 in 1972.

In the late 1980s, Calzolari retreated to Fossombrone, a small town in the Marche region of central Italy, where he has largely kept out of the public eye and worked in his studio. During the 1980s and 1990s, Calzolari participated in exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1994), MoMA PS1 in New York, and The Royal Academy of Arts.

Today, Pier Paolo Calzolari is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Kamel Mennour, Paris. His latest retrospective, titled Painting as a Butterfly, was at Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples from June 8 - September 30, 2019.