Alberto Vitucci
The Artist “Emigrates” to the US.
Maurizio Pellegrin opens exhibitions in New York and Chicago

In “La Nuova Venezia"
Venice, January 11th, 2003
 

A Venetian genius, more famous in the United States than in his own city. Frequently artists aren’t considered “prophets in their own country”.
In this case, it is also proof that not only decorative masks and tourists have remained in Venice, but that contemporary art is produced, even though it isn’t always appreciated by institutions. Maurizio Pellegrin, forty-seven years old,
is departing for the United States where a large exhibition of his work will open January 20th in New York and February 20th in Chicago.
An artist who has survived the “natural selection”, as he calls it, of the last twenty years. On his lengthy resume, numerous exhibitions in New York, where he spends a part of the year together with his wife Lorenza (who sometimes curates the texts of his works), and Chicago stand out. But also at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston and Miami. In Venice, Pellegrin has recently opened a studio in the area of San Lorenzo. Two large, restored warehouses on the ground floor, which now serve to host his latest creations. An original art, charged with many significances. Objects of memory, work instruments, animal busts, portraits, old tools and collections of “things” that the artists mounts and gathers in compositions that occupy diverse spaces. Pellegrin’s latest toil is called Trilogies.
A cinematographic work where he himself is the protagonist, inserted, using a particular technique, in the film reel of one of Spielberg’s movies.
Pellegrin, graduated in Contemporary Art at Ca’ Foscari, teaches at New York University and Columbia University.