Giorgio Andreotta Calò is an artist born in Venice in 1979. His education developed between Italy and Germany, studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Calò is a sensitive conceptual artist whose works range from sculptures to installations, focusing on concepts such as space, time, individual existence, and material transformations. In 2012, he was awarded the MAXXI Prize for his installation Prima che sia notte, and in 2014, he received the New York Prize, granted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
His works include sculptures, large-scale environmental installations, and spatial interventions that transform architectures or entire landscapes. They are often conceived to be part of a rich system of references and connections among themselves, sometimes through the use of natural elements rich in symbolic meanings, such as water, light, and fire. Walking is also a fundamental practice in his work, and Venice, with its special relationship with water, takes on an archetypal role in his artistic explorations. In 2017, at the Italian Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, he created an installation Untitled (The End of the World) with a scaffolding structure where visitors could access and walk at a higher level from which they could observe the architecture of the Arsenale reflected in a large mirror of water.

CittàdiMilano [february – july 2019] Milano

In 2019, he set up his solo exhibition CittàdiMilano. Beyond the obvious reference to the location hosting the exhibition, the title also alludes to the ship Città di Milano, the first Italian cable-laying vessel, which, 100 years earlier, in 1919, ran aground near Filicudi. The artist recovered several underwater images for the installation Untitled (Jona), which opens the exhibition.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò has explored the deep waters of imagination and history, using materials such as wood, bronze, and sediments taken from the underground of the Venetian lagoon and the mining area of Sulcis Iglesiente in Sardinia. His works include archival images of the sunken wreck, cables that had remained underwater for years, and sculptures inspired by marine organisms such as jellyfish and shells. One of the significant works is the sculpture Volver (image above), which adds a circular turn to the journey of the exhibition.