Mimmo Paladino

Mimmo Paladino grew up in Naples, where he became interested in art very early on. His work draws on a wide range of archaeological, mythological and stylistic sources, including Egyptian, Etruscan, Greco-Roman, early Christian and Roman art, all of which he considers legitimate and non-hierarchical.

In the early 1970s, he began to focus on drawing and mythological themes, which later became central to his work. In the 1980s, his work became more referential, and from 1985 he found favour in large bronze sculptures and installations: the famous intervention in the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples. In the 1990s he successfully intensified his activity abroad. He exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing and installed the work "Sleepers" in the South London Gallery Project in the brick cave under the Roundhouse at Chalk Farm in London. In 2003 Paladino was selected to represent Italian art during the Italian Presidency in Brussels. At the end of that year he was appointed a full member of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts at the Vatican.