Gian Maria Tosatti - Paradiso

Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980) is an Italian visual artist, journalist and essayist. He trained artistically between Pontedera, Warsaw and Rome in the territory of performance.

He lived in New York between 2009 and 2018. He currently lives in Naples.

His projects are long investigations of precise topics related to the concept of identity, from political and spiritual perspectives. The resulting research is pervaded by a deep sense of history.

His work consists mainly of large site-specific installations, conceived for entire buildings or urban areas.

His practice often involves the communities of the places for which the works are developed.

In 2014 Domus listed his work “My dreams, they’ll never surrender” (permanent intervention at Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples) among the world’s ten best exhibitions of the year. In 2015 the international magazine ArtReview included him among the 30 most interesting artists of his generation (Future Greats). He worked for a year in the Calais Jungle, making environmental interventions that are currently the only visible evidence of that city’s existence.

Since 2021 he has been the artistic director of La Quadriennale di Roma, the Italian national institution for the research and promotion of Italian contemporary art. In 2022 he was the first artist in the history of the Venice Biennale to represent Italy alone in the national pavilion.

Tosatti is also a writer. He is a columnist for Corriere della Sera, Il Sole 24 Ore and the magazine Opera Viva, and the director of the institutional magazine Quaderni d’arte italiana. He has written several essays on art and politics.

He has developed solo exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum (New York – 2014), MADRE museum (Naples – 2016), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York – 2011), A4 Arts Foundation (Cape Town – 2019), Manifesta 12 (Palermo-Catania – 2018), Homo Novus Festival (Riga – 2018), the Archaeological Museum of Salerno (Salerno – 2014), Fondazione Morra (Naples – 2013–2016), CIAC (Genazzano, Rome – 2009) and Galleria Lia Rumma (Naples – 2017).

His work has been exhibited at the Galleria Nazionale (Rome – 2017, 2018), Petah Tikva Museum of Art (Petah Tikva – 2017), the American Academy in Rome (Rome – 2013), Villa Croce Museum (Genoa – 2012), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome – 2008), Chelsea Art Museum (New York – 2009), BJCEM (2014), Castelli Gallery (New York – 2019) and other national and international venues.

As a curator, he has carried out projects such as Reload – prototipo d’intervento urbano (Rome – 2011), an investigation on the generation of artists and curators of the 21st century in the city of Rome (17 exhibitions and two international conferences), and the exhibition Nowhere – Now here – No we’re at the A4 Arts Foundation (Cape Town – 2019).