Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor. He was born in Florence, where he studied at the Academy from 1967 to 1969. Chia experimented with Conceptual and Performance Art in the early 1970s, before returning to painting in 1975 and adopting his characteristic style. He paints in an expressionistic, loosely figurative style emphasizing form and color. He uses vigorous brushstrokes and violent gestures with charcoal and oils, treating his large canvases as vital elements to be worked upon. “My task and my mission […] are to try to reanimate the body of the stretched canvas in front of me, as if it was a symbolic white whale found on a beach,” Chia has said. His subjects range from the everyday to the classical tradition embedded in Italian history.
Chia is one of the leading figures of the Italian 'transavanguardia', which included Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino amongst others. The artists rejected the cool intellectualism and political engagement of the 1970s, producing large-scale figurative painting.