Sandro Chia:  Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, Mosaics (monograph)
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition deluxe hardback:  February 2014.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
With an Italian translation by Brunella Antomarini.
604 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece by Alessandro Valeri, 500 color and 60 black and white reproductions.
13.3 x 9.75 x 2.5 in. (33.8 x 24.8 x 6.4 cm.), printed, sewn, and bound in Modena, Italy.
Modena, Italy:  Galleria Mazzoli Editions, 2014.

RETAIL PRICE: $250.00 (includes postage and handling)

Considering the emphasis the Florentines placed on disegno during the Renaissance, and given the fact that Sandro Chia was born in Florence (in 1946), it seems only right that this bilingual (English and Italian) monograph, Sandro Chia:  Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, Mosaics, by Richard Milazzo, should begin with an exhaustive study of 259 works on paper (drawings and watercolors) spanning over twenty years, from 1985 to 2013, and continues with essays on the artist’s paintings, sculptures and mosaics.  The texts in this monograph deal with Chia’s early work as a conceptual artist in the 1970s, and with his work as a major painter and sculptor in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Chia studied at the Istituto d’Arte and graduated from the Accademia di Arti in Florence in 1969.  As a member of the Trans-avant-garde movement in Italy in the 1980s – an international movement that included the works of Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente (the infamous three C’s), Mimmo Paladino and Nicola De Maria, and such German artists as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, among others –, Chia led the way to reshaping the art world by reasserting figurative imagery, and, the author argues, by ironically reprising the history of revolutionary art movements in the twentieth century – Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, etc. – as an endless spectrum of Postmodern tropes.  It was as if Chia had reversed the infinite regress of the mirror (History) and projected it not as art’s past but as its dynamic present and future.  It was truly a revolutionary moment, given the desiccated world of material and immaterial forms the Minimalist and Conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s had respectively wrought and left behind.  Sandro Chia:  Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, Mosaics provides detailed analyses of Chia’s evolution as a painter in the 1980s, ’90s, and during the new millennium.  It includes also full-dress studies of his sculptures and mosaics, as well as extensive interviews and several critical collaborations with the artist.

In addition to an intensive analysis of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mosaics, this monograph includes 500 color and 60 black and white reproductions, interviews and a collaborative text with the artist, a comprehensive history of the artist’s exhibitions, a complete bibliography, and an index of works.