Patricia Piccinini (born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is an Australian artist and hyperrealist sculptor. Her art work came to prominence in Australia in the late 1990s. In 2003 she was selected as the artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.
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Piccinini emigrated from Sierra Leone to Australia in 1972 with her family. She graduated with a Bachelor of Economics degree from the Australian National University or ANU, before training in Fine Art (majoring in drawing) at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.
Piccinini's mixed media works include the series Truck Babies, and the installation We are Family which was exhibited in Venice in 2003. Piccinini works with a wide range of media, including sculpture, video, drawing, installation and digital prints. Her major artworks often reflect her interests in issues such as bioethics, biotechnologies and the environment. Other Australian artists who work in a similar idiom are Martine Corompt, Sam Jinks and Ron Mueck.
According to the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia,
Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology and she uses her artistic practice as a forum for discussion about how technology impacts upon life. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome... she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture."[1]
Piccinini's work often anthropomorphises inanimate objects and presents them with a high degree of industrial finish, revealing the equal influence of 19th Century Surrealism and 20th Century advertising.
Piccinini works with several fabricators to produce her sculptures.