Introduction
Sandro Chia (born 20 April 1946) is an Italian painter and sculptor.
A native of Florence, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Enzo Cucchi. The movement was at its peak during the 1980s and was part of a wider movement of Neo-Expressionist painters around the world.
Career
After graduating from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1969, Chia travelled around Europe and to India. He began exhibiting his work in 1971, a year after moving to Rome, later referring to his early productions as ‘mythical conceptual art’. In the late 1970s he returned to painting and quickly established himself as a major artist of the movement in Italian figurative painting known as the Transavanguardia.
Completed in 1986, his 128-foot-long depiction of the Palio horse race in Siena, Italy, decorates the Palio Bar on West 51st Street in New York City.