Homage: Paintings by Pietro Lista
17 September to 12 October 2010

The Italian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong and Macao, The Consulate General of Italy in Hong Kong and Macau and the University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong are pleased to present the first exhibition in Hong Kong of the Italian artist Pietro Lista from 17 September to 12 October 2010.

Born in Perugia in 1941, Lista trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. His early years were characterised by artistic expansion and exploration. While exhibiting widely as a painter, he also established a theatrical group, a gallery, a publishing house as well as becoming a performance artist and filmmaker. Throughout the 1970s, Lista’s reputation as an artist grew and he participated in solo and international exhibitions such as the Paris Biennial (1973). Beginning in the 1980s, this polymathic artist began to focus more on the three-dimensional arts of sculpture and ceramics.

This exhibition presents a series of Lista’s paintings and sketches that explore the relationship between artist and master and the nature of originality. The concept of learning from past masters is familiar to traditional Chinese artists who often recreate the paintings and calligraphy of the past to advance in their own work. In these paintings and sketches Lista presents an homage to those artists whose use of space, form, colour and composition have been most influential in his work as a painter and a sculptor.