Biography
Matteo Massagrande was born in Padua in 1959.
He began exhibiting in 1973, participating in group shows and competitions throughout Italy, where he quickly received numerous accolades. Parallel to his painting, he developed a graphic arts career that began in 1974, marked by his presence in numerous prestigious group exhibitions. Some of his engravings have become part of the Uffizi Prints and Drawings Collection in Florence. He has held over a hundred solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad. His works can be found in numerous museums, churches, and public and private collections. In 2017, he participated in the prestigious exhibition "Canto dolente d’amore (ultimo giorno di Van Gogh)" at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza as part of the major "Van Gogh. Between Wheat and Sky" exhibition. In 2018, he took part in the exhibition "In my room: artists paint the interior 1950-NOW" at The Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (USA). He lives and works between Padua and Hajòs (Hungary).
Matteo Massagrande is one of the leading figures in the new Italian figurative art movement. His paintings depict rooms filled with distant echoes, forgotten voices, memories and nostalgia, shadows and mists, a past that refuses to be forgotten. His interiors are abandoned places, inhabited by a single true protagonist: light. A soft, turbid, dusty, and fluctuating light that sometimes forcefully enters through the huge windows opening onto immense spring gardens, while at other times it gently seeps through the cracks. This light inhabits those rooms, transforming their emptiness into an intense and vivid presence. As the artist says: “absence is not the opposite of presence, but rather a place without nuisances or distractions. A fundamental condition for discovering the hidden essence. A present where thought can reach its maximum strength: creation.”
