MAURIZIO PELLEGRIN

Venice, 1956



 

 

Opening 15 November 2025 at 12:00 noon
15 November 2025 - 15 January 2026
Tuesday - Saturday 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
GMR, Giudecca 800 Q, Venice

The Michela Rizzo Gallery is pleased to present Boulder, the group exhibition that will conclude the exhibition series at the former brewery site. The exhibition, which will open on Saturday 15 November 2025 at 12:00, will feature a dialogue between the work of Hamish Fulton and that of Matthew Attard, Ivan Barlafante, Michael Höpfner, Francesco Jodice, Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti, David Rickard, Antonio Rovaldi, Mariateresa Sartori, Claudio Tesser and Silvano Tessarollo.

Boulders is inspired by the work Boulder by Hamish Fulton, a British artist who has made walking an artistic language and an act of awareness. Based on direct experience of the landscape and a radical conception of the relationship between art and nature, Fulton's work becomes the starting point for a choral and intergenerational dialogue around the symbol of the boulder, an emblem of strength, permanence and memory of the landscape.

Within this horizon, the artists in the exhibition are arranged according to their varying degrees of proximity to Fulton's thinking. Michael Höpfner and Antonio Rovaldi share his experiential and meditative approach more directly: both investigate walking as a means of knowledge and immersion in the landscape, restoring its physical and inner dimensions through drawings, photographs and installations.

More lateral but deeply akin in poetic tension are Mariateresa Sartori, Matthew Attard and Ivan Barlafante, who translate their relationship with nature into languages of perception and thought. Sartori presents a large installation created using the frottage technique, dedicated to the materials of stones and sand, accompanied by a book that intertwines artistic vision and scientific observation. Attard, through drawing and the use of a pen plotter, transforms three-dimensional scans of boulders into graphic tracings that blend digital precision and manual intervention, exploring the limits of perception and image.

Around these nuclei are gathered artists who, while starting from different languages and perspectives, broaden the reflection on the link between man, nature and space. David Rickard explores the material and perceptual relationships between architecture and the environment; Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti and Francesco Jodice offer conceptual and narrative visions that open up the theme of landscape to new cultural and social geographies. In particular, Jodice presents a large-scale work from the WEST project, a journey through cities born during the gold rush and now abandoned, in which the landscape becomes an archive of utopias and failures.

Silvano Tessarollo and Claudio Tesser present works in which nature reveals itself in its fragile concreteness, between memory, time and transformation. The exhibition will centre on two wall paintings by Hamish Fulton, Glacial Boulder and Revisiting The Boulders, which will occupy a significant part of the space, giving shape and breath to the entire project.

With Boulder, the Michela Rizzo Gallery concludes an important season of its journey on the Giudecca, entrusting the image of the boulder – solid and immobile but at the same time shaped by time – with the task of preserving the memory of a shared place and time. A landing place that is also a threshold: the last step before a new direction.

Maurizio Pellegrin was born in Venice in 1956.
He lives between New York and the lagoon city. He graduated in Art History from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. At the same time, he dedicated himself to the study of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he obtained a Master in Fine Arts equivalent to Studio Art. He studied Sociology at the New School University and Eastern Philosophy at New York University in New York.

In the 1990s, Pellegrin began his academic career. He was Director of the Venice Program Master of Art at New York University, where he also taught for almost two decades. During those years, he joined the Teachers College at Columbia University where, in addition to teaching, he was offered the position of Senior Curator of the gallery. He also taught in the Department of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Subsequently, in 2011, he was appointed Director of the school at the National Academy Museum and School in New York, where he later became Dean and, in 2014–2015, also served as Creative Director. Also in 2017, he founded the New York School of the Arts, where he is currently Executive Director.

Pellegrin’s work has been the subject of over 150 solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions in galleries and international museums (among many: Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art; Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Akron Art Museum; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Ca’ Pesaro, Venice).

His works are held in important private and public collections worldwide, and there is a vast body of literature on his work, as author and subject of more than 40 monographs. Furthermore, his work has been published in over 500 articles and essays.

In recent years, the city of Venice has celebrated the artist by exhibiting his work in multiple institutions, such as the exhibition hosted in the Dom Pérignon Rooms at Ca’ Pesaro in 2023, Me stesso e io, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni. In 2024, he exhibited in In ordinem redigere (the art of recomposing memories) and in the solo show L’immagine ritrovata, both at Marignana Arte in Venice.

From October 2024 to May 2025, Maurizio Pellegrin’s work Vases is featured at the Wuhan Biennale in China.

 

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