Piero Golia

Retaining ties to his Italian roots, Golia was selected to represent Italy at the Biennale di Venezia in 2013. Golia installed Untitled (My Gold Is Yours) (2013), a gray cube 2.5 meters tall, composed of thirty-six tons of concrete mixed with two kilograms of gold sand and set directly on a grassy outdoor plaza. He then invited visitors to “mine” the sculpture for gold, a social proposition that would transform the physical form and monetary value of the work independent of the artist’s own direct actions.

Golia frequently operates outside the traditional parameters of studio practice, often producing situations that aim to elicit an intuitive and spontaneous response from his viewers through theatrical, conceptual gestures. In 2013 he opened Chalet, an underground Hollywood speakeasy (later restaged as Chalet Dallas at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2015) that was conceived as a space combining architecture, entertainment, and art. Working with architect Edwin Chan, Golia created his Chalets to encourage social interactions and generate a convivial art community that was visited by movie stars, art world luminaries, a local marching band, acrobats, and even a pair of alpacas. During the closing celebration of the four-month-long Dallas installation, Golia hired a mariachi band, arranged a fireworks display, and commissioned a large stage curtain printed with the iconic closing sequence from Looney Tunes cartoons, with the words “That’s All Folks!” His immediately recognizable Mariachi Painting series (2016), made from cut and stretched swatches of the Chalet Dallas curtain, serve as relics of this spectacular event.

Since 2017 Golia has developed new projects that explore social networks and retain traces of prior circumstances. At Art Basel in 2017, he realized the kinetic sculpture The Painter, which featured a robot programmed to paint abstract geometric forms onto eight large canvases whenever movement in the exhibition space was detected. The resulting Basel Paintings (2017) retain visual evidence of the process of their own making. Such pieces document the negotiation between Golia’s vision and the various realities he has to deal with, whether in terms of physical space, practical logistics, or even the laws of the city in which he works.

Golia’s paintings and sculptures have entered esteemed public collections and have been exhibited at major international museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and MoMA PS1, New York.