Piero Golia

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Piero Golia was born in Naples, Italy in 1974. Since 2002 he lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

His work has been shown in major galleries and museums in Europe and United States and featured in numerous exhibitions including Gold Standards at P.S.1 in New York^[1] and Uncertain States of America – American Art in the 3rd Millennium which toured galleries in 7 countries including the Serpentine Gallery in London and Bard College in New York.^[2]

In 2004 his feature film Killer Shrimps was selected for the Venice Film Festival^[3] and in 2005, he founded with his long time friend Eric Wesley the Mountain School of Arts,^[4] an educational institution that rapidly became a new spot on the cultural map of the city of Los Angeles.

His actions, sculptures and installations expresses the heroic poetry of the extreme gesture - the challenge of completing a nearly impossible feat or legendary action. He can be placed somewere between a romantic hero of tragedies and an alchemist. For starting his career he successfully convinced a woman to have his portrait and the words “Piero My Idol” tattooed on her back(tattoo, 2001).^[5] Soon after following an invitation to the Tirana Biennale, he rowed across the Adriatic Sea in the opposite direction to migratory movement to reach Albania(Going to Tirana, 2000). Few years later he had the entire façade of a building removed from its original site in Amsterdam and hang it on the wall of a gallery in Paris (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 2003), On January 14th 2005, Piero vanished from New York City leaving no documented proof of his whereabouts, he traveled from a place to another, crossing borders without a trace, for resurfacing only on the morning of February 7th at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen for a unique lecture about his adventoruos trip. He now lives in Los Angeles, a place that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, making it the perfect setting for his exploration into the process of myth-making and his ironic outlook on contemporary society.