BIOGRAPHY 

Michelangelo Consani was born in Livorno (1971), lives and works in Castell’Anselmo. He studied at the I.S.A in Pisa obtaining the artistic High School Diploma. From 1990 to 2000 he collaborated as lighting designer with prestigious companies including Reggiani, Flos, Nemo and Artemide. With Artemide he worked on the design of public lighting in collaboration with the studio of Italo Rota; performed lighting calculations for the RA system conceived by Sir. Norman Foster.

The work that Michelangelo Consani has been pursuing for many years now appears to fit into the genealogy of individual histories that look towards possible orientations rather than conceiving of themselves as being part of a narrative already written and tried out by others. This applies both to his view of himself as an artist and to the positioning of his work on the contemporary art scene. Indeed, his work has long been articulated in terms of minimal breaks in the reading of the existent: simple gestures that operate on the grammar of images, of discourse, of being an artist in the years of the crisis in industrial production, with the certainties of its products, be they pre-packaged food items, designer lights or art works.

At the beginning of his career, Consani worked in the tradition of the Tuscan context from which he comes: drawing as a grounding in the legacy of the masters and sculpture as an exploration of material and the techniques controlling it. From this initial experience, when he was something of an atypical sculptor, he moved towards an exponential slowing down of his output, understood as the creation of material goods, of objects to consume, of fetishes, and began to concentrate on questioning the categories that determine our Western condition as modern consumers, destined, that is, to be constant producers.

Michelangelo Consani has exhibited in numerous private and public institutions in Italy and abroad from 1999 to-date. Some of these are: ArtKliazma (Moscow); MACRO (Rome); MAC VAL (Paris); Schunck (Heerlen); Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella); Kunstraum München (Munich), Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’Art Contemporain (Luxembourg); Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art (Prato); Darb 1718 Contemporary Art & Culture (Cairo); Frigoriferi Milanesi (Milan); Fondation Donwahi (Ivory Coast); Kunstenfestival Watou (Watou); PAV (Turin); Italian Cultural Institute (Tokyo); Kyoto Imperial Palace (Kyoto).

Consani also participated in the 11^th Architecture Biennale (Venice); the 1^st Aichi Triennial (Nagoya); the 15^th Dakar Biennial (Dakar); the 2^nd Valencia Biennale (Spain); the16^th Rome Quadriennale (Italy); the 14^th Carrara International Sculpture Biennale (Italy).

The KunstvereinMilan / Amsterdam / New York has published a monograph on the artist’s work, curated by Matteo Lucchetti, entitled “Caspian Depression and a One Straw Revolution”. It has been presented at PS1 in New York and at the Independent Publishing Festival in Berlin.