Piero Pizzi Cannella (Rocca di Papa, 1955) is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Italian painting. Trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome under Alberto Ziveri, in 1982 he established his studio in the former Pastificio Cerere in the San Lorenzo district, co-founding with Bruno Ceccobelli, Gianni Dessì, Giuseppe Gallo, Nunzio and Marco Tirelli the Scuola di San Lorenzo — one of the most significant movements in Italian art of the 1980s.
His language is quiet and precise: familiar objects — chairs, garments, drums, shells — stripped of any narrative context and returned as pure presences, suspended between memory and abstraction. A painting that does not explain, but evokes. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1988, 1993 and 2011, and in the 1st Beijing International Art Biennale in 2003. In 2017 a solo exhibition was held at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
