Francesco Pignatelli Italian, 1971

Francesco Pignatelli (Milan, Italy, 1971)

Born in Milan in 1971, Francesco Pignatelli began his career as a photographer in the 1990s in London, focusing in particular on experimental photography.

His production varies in subjects and settings from the portraits of the series Telling Portraits of 1999 aimed at analysing the psychological dimensions of certain illustrious figures from the worlds of cinema, theatre and photography, to the urban subject, with the series Reversed Cities of 2002, in which urban views undergo a process of negative printing so as to create a chromatic transfiguration that suspends the images in a metaphysical dimension, where one loses track of time and memory.

Connections and references with other art forms such as film, sculpture and painting are frequent in Pignatelli's work. The series Reversed Renaissance dates back to 2004, in which Pignatelli pays homage to the relationship between painting and photography by producing a work in which the artist brings some of the Renaissance masterpieces back to a photographic experience, thus restoring a certain spontaneity to the antique thanks to an operation of updating the past.

Over the years, he has been very active both in Italy and abroad.  From 1999 to the present, he has realised installations in galleries and public spaces in important cities such as Turin, Venice, Milan, Florence, Moscow, Moscow, Zurich, Cologne, Strasbourg, Bonn, Paris and Toronto.

In 2014, on the occasion of the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, he was one of five international artists invited to Moscow to represent one of the five Olympic years with his work on the occasion of the centenary of the Olympic flag.

The artist currently lives and works in Milan.