Gabriele Di Matteo

Gabriele di Matteo was born in 1957 in Torre del Greco, Italy.

He lives and works between Naples and Milan, Italy. After studying painting at the School of Fine Arts in Naples, in 1985 Gabriele Di Matteo exhibited in Evacuare Napoli, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, at the Grenoble Institute in Naples. The paintings he showed there echoed the language of the neo-expressionists but in an ironically theatrical key. Already the following year the artist made a radical linguistic zeroing. As for 1 + 1 = 0, now part of the collection of the Museo Madre, the reset made led Di Matteo to create works that trigger other mechanisms of conceptual reflection. In 1989, with the work Cassa Contanti, he won the Saatchi & Saatchi Prize. On this occasion his alter ego Armando della Vittoria intervened for the first time. Later, in 1992, under the identity of Armando della Vittoria, Di Matteo founded the magazine E il Topo. The first issue of this artist magazine was presented together with the artists Piero Gatto, Franco Silvestro and Vedova Mazzei, this year in Milan at Viafarini. In the following years Gabriele di Matteo produced great cycles of works such as La Vie illustrée de Marcel Duchamp 1993, Arafat 1995, The Blind Man 1998, History Stripped Bare 2000/2005, Le Peintre salue la mer 2005, Jackson Pollock Life 2009, China Made in Italy 2010. In 2002 the first retrospective exhibition of the artist was organized in France by Frac Limousin, together with Frac Bretagne, at the Centre d'Art Le Grand Café in Saint Nazaire. Recently his works have been exhibited at MAM (Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, at MAMCO in Geneva at Art Basel Unlimited and at the Perez Museum in Miami.