Giuseppe Riccardo Lanza (1933 - 1986)
G.R. Lanza was born in 1933 in Piossasco, near Turin in Italy. Versatile artist and very active from the fifties until 1986, the year of his tragic death, Lanza explores through different artistic expressions (painting, sculpture, photography, graphics) the theme of the city as human habitat, in its real and metaphorical aspect, considering it as a sign, a trace that man leaves of himself in the environment in which he lives.
His first works are mainly pictorial: ambiguity of lines, imaginary cities, superimposed geometries.
At the turn of the Fifties and Sixties a research on materials begins: the paintings become two-dimensional wooden constructions, boxes in search of a summary of the urban habitat, with a strongly theatrical aspect.
Then he decides to intervene directly on the environment by designing a monumental sculpture on the hill of Piossasco, or with the construction of a scene-sculpture in the quarry of S. Valeriano, or even with the sculptural-theatrical intervention on the artificial reef of Bordigh.
