Paolo Canevari
Born in 1963 in Rome to a family of artists, Paolo Canevari lives and works between Rome and New York. Trained as a sculptor, he is rooted in the dual heritage of American Minimalism and Arte Povera, developing a diverse practice—sculpture, video, installation, drawing—marked by a constant reflection on memory, destruction, and the permanence of art.
Rubber is the emblematic material of his work. Since the early 1990s, he has transformed inner tubes, tires, and vulcanised sheets into monumental sculptures — Totem (1990), Materia Oscura (1990-2020) — exploiting the absolute black of the material as a unique and radical colour. Canevari opposes the monumental sculptural tradition with his own codes, contrasting the impermanence of industrial waste with the permanence of marble. Rubber, flexible, recyclable, capable of losing its shape once the exhibition is over, embodies a vision of art as ephemeral memory rather than as a fixed monument.
His images — skulls, crosses, tires, flags — are universally readable symbols, repurposed to question religion, power, destruction, and resilience.
