Biography

Luigi FiloGrano (Italy) lives and works between Vigevano and Milan.

For more than thirty years, FiloGrano has developed an artistic practice centred on the concept of balance, understood as a structural, perceptual and existential condition, always observed in its precariousness and instability.

His artistic research has evolved over time alongside various professional experiences, including engineering, interior architecture and the teaching of scientific subjects, including physics. Experiences seemingly distant from artistic practice have progressively contributed to shaping his artistic language, fostering an increasingly conscious interest in the relationships between matter, weight, gravity, structure, space and balance. Alongside these activities, FiloGrano has maintained a constant artistic practice over the years, with initially intermittent exhibition activity, gradually allowing him to devote an increasingly central part of his professional life to artistic research and to develop its exhibition dimension from the early 2000s onwards.

After experimenting with various expressive techniques – from painting to mixed media – he devoted more than twenty years primarily to drawing on poplar and birch wood panels, using graphite, pastels and different materials layered over one another. In these works, his reflection focused on the fragile balances of the human condition, the relationship between eros and death, and the memory of the art of the past, reinterpreted through a contemporary sensibility.

In recent years, his research has found a new and more fully developed expression through three-dimensional works and installations, which are now at the centre of his practice. Trunks and branches of eucalyptus recovered from nature, intersected by steel, iron or brass rods, become structures in which natural matter and human intervention coexist in a continuous tension between stability and precariousness. Balance is never presented as a definitive condition, but as a dynamic and constantly reversible process.

These works address the themes of the environmental crisis, deforestation, biodiversity loss and the increasingly problematic relationship between human beings and nature. The natural element does not represent the subject of the work, but constitutes its actual material, taking on a strong symbolic significance.

Alongside his installations, FiloGrano develops a series of wall-mounted works on slate panels, in which metal rods, minerals, natural elements and essential forms continue the same investigation into the concept of balance, condensing it into a more intimate yet equally structural dimension.

His background in engineering and architecture, together with his experience in physics, architecture and design, influences his artistic language, directing his research towards relationships between weight, tension, gravity, matter and space, in which each element assumes a constructive as well as a symbolic function.

He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2011 Venice Biennale (Italian Pavilion – Turin and Venice) and Art Nordic – Contemporary Art Fair in Copenhagen (2018), and has received recognition in drawing competitions, including the Basi Prize (2011). His works are held in public and museum collections, including the Museum Allotropya in Delphi, Greece, and a museum collection in Boston.