Through the recontextualization of familiar subjects, objects and places, Paola Pivi’s work creates surprising and enigmatic situations that challenge viewers’ perceptions. Whether by staging a photograph of two zebras on a snowy mountaintop or transforming a contemporary art museum into an arena of screaming people, her irreverent installations, sculptures, performances, and photographs bring together playful and unexpected elements from our everyday world that present the inconceivable as real.

 

In her new work, "How I Roll," a twin-engine plane, supported by vertical steel posts at the wing tips, rotates in the center of Doris C. Freedman Plaza. This subversion of the expected—the juxtaposition of a busy Midtown Manhattan plaza with a Piper Seneca slowly rotating on its own axis—is central to Pivi’s practice. "How I Roll" is her first public art project in the United States.

 

Paola Pivi (b. 1971, Milan) lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has been exhibited widely across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the United States. Solo exhibitions have been presented by Sculpture International Rotterdam (2010 ); Tate Modern, London (2009 ); Kunsthalle Basel (2007); Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2006); MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2003); and Castello di Rivoli Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (1999), among others. Pivi received the Golden Lion Award at the 1999 Venice Biennale.