Biography. Giorgio Piccaia is an Italian-Swiss artist, painter, sculptor and independent thinker, born in Geneva in 1955. The son of painter Matteo Piccaia, he grew up in a family deeply rooted in the arts, coming into contact from an early age with Geneva’s vibrant cultural scene and, later, that of Milan. His artistic development was shaped by a variety of experiences in which painting, architecture, theatre, philosophy and experimental research converged to define an independent and constantly evolving artistic identity.
After spending his early years in Geneva, he moved to Italy in 1965 and, in 1975, enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, where he met Corrado Levi, a pivotal figure in his approach to painting and the visual arts. During those years, he became actively involved in alternative artistic research, organising happenings, performances and cultural initiatives. Two encounters proved particularly influential in his development: his meeting with John Cage on the occasion of the celebrated concert at Milan’s Teatro Lirico in 1977, and his encounter with Jerzy Grotowski in 1978, followed by his attendance at the Laboratory Theatre in Wrocław in 1980. These experiences fostered Piccaia’s particular sensitivity to gesture, the body, silence and the gradual elimination of the superfluous—elements that would continue to shape his artistic research.
Alongside his artistic practice, he devoted several years to independent publishing and cultural promotion, contributing to magazines and projects dedicated to art and contemporary thought. In 2005, he returned his full attention to artistic practice, giving renewed impetus to a path encompassing painting, sculpture, installation and video art. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, in venues that reflect the breadth of his interests and his ongoing willingness to engage with different languages and disciplines.
A fundamental turning point in his research came in 2018, when he rediscovered the figure of Leonardo Pisano, known as Fibonacci, through a dialogue with the Greek Orthodox monk Gregory Sinaite, whom he met during a visit to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. This experience gave rise to a new and multifaceted artistic project devoted to the famous mathematical sequence and to the relationships between number, nature, proportion and the universe. The Fibonacci sequence gradually became a central presence in his work: numbers evolved into visual signs, compositional rhythms and instruments for exploring an underlying order that permeates both the natural world and the human dimension.
In Piccaia’s work, mathematics sheds its apparent abstract coldness and opens up to poetic and symbolic interpretation. Numbers, colours, forms and materials interact across the painted surface and within space, generating compositions in which the precision of the sequence meets the freedom of artistic gesture. Alongside this research, the motif of Myosotis—the five-petalled flowers commonly known as forget-me-nots—takes on particular significance, evoking memory, the simplicity of nature and the possibility of rediscovering an authentic relationship with what is essential.
The Fibonacci project finds significant expression in exhibitions and events presented across different venues in Pisa and Venice, as well as in Varese, Milan, Como, Chiasso and Geneva, among other cities, where the works enter into dialogue with museums, historic architecture and public spaces. Over time, this research has expanded through the use of new materials, installations and exhibition opportunities, while maintaining the relationship between art and knowledge at its core. His work continues to explore the boundaries between rationality and intuition, mathematical structure and sensitivity, the individual and the whole.
Giorgio Piccaia lives and works in Agrate Conturbia, Piedmont, Italy. His artistic practice unfolds as an open-ended journey in which art becomes a means of observing the world and recognising the invisible connections that unite its many manifestations. Through painting and sculpture, Piccaia invites viewers to look beyond the immediate appearance of things, seeking in number, nature and memory a possible key to understanding existence.
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