Luciano Chessa

Luciano Chessa is an audiovisual and performance artist.

His work includes assemblage, graphic scoring, painting, opera, sculpture and several other media. His works include A Heavenly Act, an opera-installation commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ‘Piombo’, a work for 2bows cello written for Frances-Marie Uitti and commissioned by NYC’s MAGAZZINO Italian Art, and Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, a 60-hours opera-installation on fasting commissioned by the Festival TRANSART and MUSEION, Bolzano’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibit ‘Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe’. Chessa’s work appeared more than once in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze, and has been featured in the Italian issue of Marie Claire and in the September Issue of Vogue Italia, and is found in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe. He has collaborated with artists of the likes of Mike Kelley, Kalup Linzy, Michael Tavioni, Ugo Rondinone, Tarik Kiswanson, Chris Newman, Jacopo Benassi, the collective Canemorto and Terry Berlier; presented his works in such museums as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, SFMOMA, MONA in Tasmania, and the MART in Rovereto; and has been artist in residence at CivitellaRanieri, Lucas Artists Residency in Villa Montalvo, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Djerassi Residency Artist Program, the Harrison House in Joshua Tree, and Tavioni Art Gallery and Vanganga in Avarua, Rarotonga (Cook Islands).

Between September 2023 and October 2024 Chessa was artist in residence at Monaco’s Direction des Affairs Culturelles to create Monaco Mobile, a new installation for artmonte-carlo (July 2024) and Monaco Veloce, a new performance produced by the Théâtre Princesse Grace in collaboration with the Automobile Club de Monaco, the Pavillion Bosio, and the Médiathèque de Monaco (September 2024). In Il Corriere della Sera, Francesca Pini praised Monaco Mobile as an, “installation that acts as a sort of mantra”, with its, “intricate design of vibrating ropes and iridescent lights.”