Sergio Sarra (Pescara 1961) is an Italian artist and former basketball player.
In 1985, at the age of 24, he retired from playing competitively in order to study at the School of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, concluding in 1987. Sarra took part in the Biennial of Young Artists from Mediterranean Europe (Barcelona – 1987), Venice Biennale at the Corderie dell'Arsenale (1993) in Aperto '93, at the Italian Pavilion (2011) and in the Havana Biennial (2000). Sarra curated the group exhibition Conversione di Saulo at Palazzo Chigi Odescalchi (Rome – 2000) and exhibited at the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană (Bucharest – 2007) and the WAX Winkler Art Xperience (Budapest – 2007) in Altered States – Are you experienced?, group exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Paolo Falcone, and at Baths of Diocletian (Rome – 2008) at Cose mai viste curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 2019, Sarra exhibited at 4th Festival del Paesaggio in Anacapri.
Other group exhibitions at: Palazzo Rondanini alla Rotonda (Rome – 1989), Palazzo della Permanente (Milan – 1991) and Espace Pierre Cardin (Paris – 1992), 34 Spoleto Festival of 2Worlds (Fonti del Clitunno – 1991), Fondazione Orestiadi (Gibellina – 1992), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome – 1992, 1995), Fondazione Volume! (Rome – 2000).
Sarra has held solo exhibitions at public and private institutions including the Faculty of Architecture of University of Palermo (1998), the Micromuseum for Contemporary Art and Culture (Palermo – 2004), Circolo Filologico Milanese (Milan – 2008), the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia (Rome – 2013), the Ewha Womans University (Seoul – 2016), the Benedictine Abbey of Propezzano (Morro d'Oro – 2018), Mattatoio Museo d'Arte Contemporanea (Rome - 2019).
From the beginning of his artistic career, Sarra worked almost exclusively with painting, drawing and sculpture. In 1997, the art critic and curator Lorenzo Benedetti wrote:
Life and work
He played for the national youth teams, making his debut at sixteen in the Italian Series A basketball championship with the Fortitudo Bologna team.
Upon completing his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna (1987), Sarra then moved to Rome where he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Alice in 1990, presenting an installation consisting of four painted sheets of glass and crossed by white light from industrial neon tubes. Such works – being glass – on which Sarra drew symbolic and enigmatic figures, went on to become a constant in his work. In this sense, two solo exhibitions – Trinacria dream (Oporto – 2007) and un ambiente, sei vetri (Rome – 2013) – appear indicative. In occasion of the exhibition in Portugal, art critic Miguel Amado wrote:
Over the next few years, he produced a series of paintings on emulsified canvas – Primitive – comprising zoomorphic figures that were almost always mirror images. The artist was invited to take part in the Aperto '93 Emergency/Emergenza - 45 Venice Biennale, where he created an environment consisting of a long wooden platform in chipboard with three paintings on the walls featuring: Iguane, Paesaggio and Autoritratto. Clarity and essentiality become the dominant factors in his work.
In the paintings after 1997, the artist poses with his 'sign-drawing', being continuous and abstract, various elements – faces, zoomorphic groups, buildings with unknown geometries – that insist upon previous pictorial composition processes that are not entirely erased to reveal further combinatorial forms. In Une correspondance sur les fantômes avec Sergio Sarra between Sarra e Nicolas Bourriaud in May 2007, the French critic and theorist wrote:
In 2000, in Rome, his works were exhibited at the Fondazione Volume!. In the same year, Sarra curated at Palazzo Chigi Odescalchi the group exhibition Conversione di Saulo that was developed around the painting of the same name, painted in 1600 by Caravaggio. Also in 2000, Sarra married Elisabetta Ruscitti in Amalfi, with whom he lived for a short time in Naples. In 2001, their son Gerolamo Papik Merlino was born. It was in Naples that he produced Table Sculpture (table projection on 12 points), a table/sculpture with a huge red Komodo dragon hooked underneath.