Overview
Sergio Sarra (Pescara 1961) is an Italian artist and former basketball player. In 1985, at the age of 24, he retired from playing competitively in order to study at the School of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, concluding in 1987. Sarra took part in the Biennial of Young Artists from Mediterranean Europe (Barcelona – 1987), Venice Biennale at the Corderie dell'Arsenale (1993) in Aperto '93, at the Italian Pavilion (2011) and in the Havana Biennial (2000).
Sarra curated the group exhibition Conversione di Saulo at Palazzo Chigi Odescalchi (Rome – 2000) and exhibited at the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană (Bucharest – 2007) and the WAX Winkler Art Xperience (Budapest – 2007) in Altered States – Are you experienced?, group exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Paolo Falcone, and at Baths of Diocletian (Rome – 2008) at Cose mai viste curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 2019, Sarra exhibited at 4th Festival del Paesaggio in Anacapri. Other group exhibitions at: Palazzo Rondanini alla Rotonda (Rome – 1989), Palazzo della Permanente (Milan – 1991) and Espace Pierre Cardin (Paris – 1992), 34 Spoleto Festival of 2Worlds (Fonti del Clitunno – 1991), Fondazione Orestiadi (Gibellina – 1992), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome – 1992, 1995), Fondazione Volume! (Rome – 2000).
Sarra has held solo exhibitions at public and private institutions including the Faculty of Architecture of University of Palermo (1998), the Micromuseum for Contemporary Art and Culture (Palermo – 2004), Circolo Filologico Milanese (Milan – 2008), the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia (Rome – 2013), the Ewha Womans University (Seoul – 2016), the Benedictine Abbey of Propezzano (Morro d'Oro – 2018), Mattatoio Museo d'Arte Contemporanea (Rome - 2019). From the beginning of his artistic career, Sarra worked almost exclusively with painting, drawing and sculpture. In 1997, the art critic and curator Lorenzo Benedetti wrote:
Life and work
, Sergio Sarra e Darnell Valentine, Italia – USA, AST Under-18 Basketball World Cup, Mannheim (FRG), 1977 He played for the national youth teams, making his debut at sixteen in the Italian Series A basketball championship with the Fortitudo Bologna team. Upon completing his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna (1987), Sarra then moved to Rome where he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Alice in 1990, presenting an installation consisting of four painted sheets of glass and crossed by white light from industrial neon tubes. Such works – being glass – on which Sarra drew symbolic and enigmatic figures, went on to become a constant in his work. In this sense, two solo exhibitions – Trinacria dream (Porto – 2007) and un ambiente, sei vetri (Rome – 2013) – appear indicative.
In occasion of the exhibition in Portugal, art critic Miguel Amado wrote: Over the next few years, he produced a series of paintings on emulsified canvas – Primitive – comprising zoomorphic figures that were almost always mirror images. The artist was invited to take part in the Aperto '93 Emergency/Emergenza in chipboard with three paintings on the walls featuring: Iguane, Paesaggio and Autoritratto. Clarity and essentiality become the dominant factors in his work. In the paintings after 1997, the artist poses with his 'sign-drawing', being continuous and abstract, various elements – faces, zoomorphic groups, buildings with unknown geometries – that insist upon previous pictorial composition processes that are not entirely erased to reveal further combinatorial forms.
In Une correspondance sur les fantômes avec Sergio Sarra between Sarra e Nicolas Bourriaud in May 2007, the French critic and theorist wrote: In 2000, in Rome, his works were exhibited at the Fondazione Volume!. In the same year, Sarra curated at Palazzo Chigi Odescalchi the group exhibition Conversione di Saulo a table/sculpture with a huge red Komodo dragon hooked underneath. Over the same period, he produced the performance Life drawing no. 2, representing the connection between the manual creation and collective fruition in which Sarra coerces the public's perceptive nature, using a strobe light to produce a decisive intermittence between darkness and light.
This is the same direction in which Sarra heads when painting 'from real life' inside the WAX Kultúrgyár in Budapest and the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană in Bucharest for the exhibition Altered States – Are you Experienced? (2006–2007). Between 2006 and 2009, Sarra worked on a series of paintings entitled Psichedelyc garden, a book in which he collates a series of drawings and writings focused on the city of Pescara. In 2012, he designed Handrail for Cubist Films, inspired by Fernand Léger's 1924 film Ballet Mécanique, and the diptych Involuntary Commitment, in Rome and at Fuori Uso 2012 accompanied by a short text written by the artist: Traces of the theoretical processes underlying his works can be found in the short film My Painting Technique (2009, 2015).
Main readings
* *Bonito Oliva, Achille (1990). "L'arte fino al 2000 di Achille Bonito Oliva". In Argan, Giulio Carlo (ed.). L'Arte Moderna di Giulio Carlo Argan, volume attached to Corriere della Sera of 28 November 1990, Vol. 11. Milan: RCS Editoriale Quotidiani SpA. * * * D'Avossa Antonio (1993). "Vedute sul Mondo Reale". In Achille Bonito Oliva (curated by), "Punti cardinali dell'arte", catalog of the 45th International Exhibition of Art in Venice, Vol. I, Venice, Marsilio Editori S.P.A., 1993, , OCLC, OPAC IT\ICCU\RAV\0225285. * D'Avossa, Antonio (1993). "La risposta, amico mio, sta soffiando nel vento – Lettera aperta a Pep Agut, Bigert & Bergström, Marco Brandizzi, Giorgio Cattani, Maria Eichhorn, Marcelo Expósito, Carsten Höller, Kirsten Mosher, Luca Quartana, Sergio Sarra e SubREAL". In Bonito Oliva, Achille; Kontova, Helena; Daney, Serge; et al. (eds.).
Aperto '93: Emergency/Emergenza: Flash Art International, exhibition catalogue. Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore. . OCLC 832241900. OPAC IT\ICCU\LO1\0323441. * Caruso, Rossella; et al. (1993). "ateleta". In Bonito Oliva, Achille; Kontova, Helena; Daney, Serge (eds.). Aperto '93: Emergency/Emergenza: Flash Art International, exhibition catalogue. Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore. . OCLC. OPAC IT\ICCU\LO1\0323441. * * * Sarra, Sergio (2000). "Conversione di Saulo", exhibition catalogue. Pescara: Edizioni Arte Nova. OCLC. OPAC IT\ICCU\TO0\0918995. * * Curi, Umberto (2007). "Testo dedicato all'opera "Ipotesi di Biblioteca di Chimica dell'Università di Padova (LSD)" di Sergio Sarra". Special Project. In Bourriaud, Nicolas; Falcone, Paolo. Altered States – Are you experienced?, exhibition catalogue. Pescara: Edizioni Arte Nova. OCLC. OPAC IT\ICCU\URB\0638550. * * * Marsala, Helga (2008).
"Noisy Writings. Sergio Sarra's Aesthetics of Void". In Sergio Sarra : pearl fishermen, exhibition catalogue. Milan: Circolo Filologico Milanese. OCLC. OPAC IT\ICCU\RMS\2754024. * Piccoli, Cloe (2011). "Town drawings". In Sergio Sarra, perché la spiaggia si assottiglia dopo le Nàiadi. Silvi (Teramo): Edizione Sarra Varano. . OCLC. OPAC IT\ICCU\TER\0036016. *Curi, Umberto, La Pescara di Sergio Sarra, 13 December 2011. * *Sarra, Sergio (2016). "Icebergs". In Sergio Sarra : excluding the things I chose to do, exhibition catalogue. Rome: Edizioni di Comunità. . OCLC 1124656885. OPAC IT\ICCU\BVE\0813805. * Cherubini, Laura (2018). "INFINITY. Bruna Esposito & Sergio Sarra in Recanati". In Bruna Esposito Sergio Sarra, exhibition catalogue. Recanati (Macerata): Idill'Io arte contemporanea. OCLC. OPAC IT\ICCU\BVE\0803903. * * D'Orazio, Giorgio (2018). "I Say to You". In Sarra, Sergio (ed.).
Dico a te, exhibition catalogue. Morro d'Oro (Teramo): Abbey of Propezzano. OCLC 1105931902.1103488942. OPAC IT\ICCU\BVE\0803753. * Pietroiusti, Cesare Maria (2019). untitled. In Sergio Sarra : excluding the things I chose to do, exhibition catalogue. Rome: Edizioni di Comunità. . OCLC 1124656885. OPAC IT\ICCU\BVE\0813805. * Cherubini, Laura (2019). "Sergio Sarra. At the drawing board". In Sergio Sarra : excluding the things I chose to do, exhibition catalogue. Rome: Edizioni di Comunità. . OCLC, OPAC IT\ICCU\BVE\0813805. *Benassi, Giuliana (2019). "The art-life study". In Camerlengo, Simone (ed.). OPENWORK : a focus on painting, exhibition catalogue. *Sarra, Sergio (2020). Sergio Sarra twenty six figures painted on board. Bologna: Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, 2020, , OPAC IT\ICCU\RMS\2968431. *Bruni, Lorenzo.
"Things Seen", Critique of the exhibition, 2021. *Legrenzi, Susanna, "L'artista Sergio Sarra: «Ho pensato lo studio come un'installazione. Più che in armonia, in contrasto con il paesaggio»". In Living, Vol. 10, pp. 200-209, volume attached to Corriere della Sera of 6 October 2021, Vol. 237.