Lonely Dude

Sandro Chia (born 20 April 1946) is an Italian painter and sculptor. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was, with Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria (it) and Mimmo Paladino, a principal member of the Italian Neo-Expressionist movement which was baptised Transavanguardia by Achille Bonito Oliva.

Chia was born in Florence, in Tuscany in central Italy, on 20 April 1946. He studied at the Istituto d'Arte di Firenze from 1962 to 1967, and then, until 1969, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. He then travelled in Europe, in Turkey and in India. He settled in Rome in 1970, and began to show work in the following year. He spent the winter of 1980–1981 in Mönchengladbach, in Nordrhein-Westfalen in West Germany, on a study grant.  Later that year he moved to New York in the United States, where he lived for more than twenty years. In 1984–1985 he taught at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Chia's early work tended towards Conceptualism, but from the mid-1970s he began to turn towards more a figurative approach. In June 1979 Paul Maenz showed work by Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino at his gallery in Cologne, in Germany. In an article in Flash Art in the same year, the critic Achille Bonito Oliva characterised the group as a new art movement, which he called "Transavanguardia".