Claudia Peill

Biography

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Born in Genoa in 1963 and a graduate of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Claudia Peill began exhibiting in the 1990s.

Right from the start her artistic practice focused on the relationship between painting and photography, and the act of combining two very different artistic languages soon became central to her work.

Over time she has experimented with different materials, while establishing a dialectical relationship between abstraction and figuration. Her works featured paraffin and wax to begin with, and then synthetic resins. In 2010 she began introducing acrylics painted directly onto linen canvas, and transposed the photographs that have always been her starting point onto a specialist photographic canvas. The supports may have changed over the years, but the dialogue between the two languages continues to be underscored and reinforced by the contrast between figurative and non-figurative elements.

 

Peill’s subjects range across a wide visual and conceptual spectrum, from the roadside signage and markings that characterized her early works of street art to forms of architecture (including archaeological sites and, equally often, industrial architectures), as well as contemporary urban landscapes. In her most recent works she has begun using resins again, and her subjects include clouds and the sky — as can be seen in the works on show in this exhibition. So, in what she is now representing the element of abstraction is further intensified, in an exploration of the state of intangibility and indeterminateness that ultimately lies at the heart of her work.

The unifying thread running through all the themes she addresses is the dialectical tension between the visible and the invisible/presence and absence, which lends Peill’s work a chimerical and timeless quality.

 

Since 1993 the artist has exhibited widely in galleries, museums and public institutions in Italy and internationally, including: Künstverein, Steyr (1999); Museo Pecci, Prato (2000); Künstlerhaus Vienna (2001); the Italian Cultural Institutes in London and Cologne (2003); Galleria Pack, Milano, (2004); Galleria Martano, Turin (2004); Galleria Anna D’Ascanio, Rome (2006); Galerie Rossella Junk, Berlin (2007); Galleria Mara Coccia, Rome (2012); Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen, Rome (2014); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2015); Museo Casa di Goethe, Rome and Berlin (2016); Anna Marra Contemporanea, Rome (2017); Gallen-Kallela Museum, Helsinki (2018-2019); Great Beauty Contemporary Art Museum, Beijing (2019); Villa Olmo, Como (2022); Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Rome (2024); Galerie Plan_d, Düsseldorf (2025); MARCA (Museo Arte Contemporanea), Catanzaro (2025-2026).

 

Over the years she has made several works of public art that remain on permanent display, and her work features in private, public and institutional collections including the Museo Pecci in Prato and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome. The catalogues and other volumes dedicated to her work include the monograph Claudia Peill, edited by Mario de Candia (Gangemi Editore, 2017) and the volume Non calpestare/Don’t Tread Here (Gangemi Editore, 2023).

 

She lives and works in Rome and teaches Photography at the Accademia di Belle Arti in L’Aquila.