Luigi Ontani (1943)
Italy

"“Unfaithful angel, androgynous, ephebe, hermaphrodite, sagittarius…”, as he presented himself in 1974, Luigi Ontani (born in 1943 in Grizzana Morandi, Italy) occupies a unique place in the panorama of international art as it was constituted in the mid-1970s. Involved from its beginnings in a journey through identity, it brings together the sacred and the profane, bringing together the West and the East. His body is dressed in the skin of the world, while he allows himself all the metamorphoses and lends his face to Leonardo as well as to Columbus, embodies Dante, Krishna, Saint Sebastian or Pinocchio. Through his self-portraits, but also his ceramic or papier-mâché sculptures, his large watercolors and paintings from the 1990s, his early video works or his most recent photographs with three-dimensional effects and other “Balinese”-inspired wooden sculptures, Ontani opens the way for a cultivated rereading of the history of art and cross-dressing, postmodernism, performance and strategies of appropriation."
(Source, website, Les Presses du Réel)

Work :

• La favola impropriata (1970)