Gregorio Botta

Gregorio Botta was born in Naples in 1953, but in 1960 he moved with his family to Rome. There, in the 1980s, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts attending  a course taught by Toti Scialoja.
Botta is the author of sculptures and installations loaded with meanings that take on essential forms thanks to choices made directly on materials and their specific shades of color. Between the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, he debuted by taking part in exhibits organized in various galleries in the capital: his first solo exhibition in 1991 at Il Segno Gallery, with whom he then frequently collaborated. In this period, critics expressed particular interest in his work. This attention occurred with various exhibitions, including Trasparenze dell’arte italiana sulla via della seta curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, installed in Beijing in 1993, for the XII Rome Quadriennale and the Biennial of Parks at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, in 1996 and in 1998 respectively, as well as the solo show presented the same year by Pratesi at the Italian Institute of Culture in Cologne. His exhibitions ran parallel with continuous research on materials and the choice of recurring archetypal elements. Botta exhibited at numerous galleries, such as the Trisorio Gallery in Naples in 1999 and the Galleria dello Scudo in Verona in 2001. In time, the use of wax,  a primary element in his work, was joined by fire, water, air, and glass, which emerged in the production of new works, giving movement and lightness to each intervention.
Enormous sensitivity was also dedicated to the relationship between space and its user. An evident aspect in exhibits such as Dove sei/opere 2005-2006, held in Siena at the Magazzini del Sale in 2006, where the dialogue with the surrounding environment became an almost immersive experience thanks to the music and videos inserted from the collaboration with the film director Felice Farina and with the musician  Luigi Cinque. An approach that was proposed again at the gallery Volume! In 2009, always with Farina, and with the site-specific project for the exhibit Rifugi, curated by Guglielmo Gigliotti at MACRO in Rome in 2012. The ever-present relationship with history, classicism and memory powerfully emerges in the exhibit Post Classici curated by Vincenzo Trione in 2013 at the Roman Forum and the Palatine in Rome. Ulisse, located in the Domitian stadium, is an iron structure animated by water, which recalls the minimum structure of a house and the proportions of the Temple of Portuno. Literature and the use of words as living matter to be shaped are found again in the exhibit In Water in 2014 at Palazzo Te in Mantua. The artist created nine large lead sheets and carved the epitaph “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” of the English poet John Keats into them.
In 2015 he shows at the Triennale in Milan Un’Altra Ultima cena (Another Last Supper) curated by Vincenzo Trione. Here Botta, coming from the ritual of the Last Supper by Leonardo, through the reconstruction of his own scenery, develops a reflection about the sacrality of nourishment. At Il Ponte gallery in Florence he sets up the exhibition Ciò che resta (The Remains), accompanied by The Newspaper of The Exhibition with a text by Lea Mattarella.

His works are part of the collections of Mart in Rovereto, Musma in Matera, Gam and Macro in Rome, of the Bce in Frankfurt, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Farnesina, the Certosa of Padula (SA), and in the subway of Naples.