"Art is a tool for humanity to nourish itself, to know that that which is highest belongs to everyone"
Introduction
Piero Resta was born August 3rd, 1940, in Voghera, Italy. He was the son of an ace WWII pilot, Luigi Resta, and Grazie Becagli. Resta's artistic career began shortly after he went to military school in Italy. He studied architecture at the Instituto Leonardo Da Vinci in Florence.
In the early 60's, he participated in underground art movements in London. In 1963, he moved into New York's Chelsea District and worked with artists Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Allen Ginsberg, and Gerald Malanga. He also participated in collective art exhibits in the East Coast, where he exhibited his first paintings and drawings.
In New York, he opened a fashion photography studio and his photographs were featured in numerous fashion magazines, including Mademoiselle and Italian Vogue.
In 1969, he moved to Bolinas, California lived as a hermit on the beach for one year. After this period of recluse, he founded and became the ringmaster to an avant-garde circus, known interchangeably as "Circo del Sol," "The Now Primitives," and "Piero Resta's Moving Theater." He and his troupe of performance artists performed throughout Mexico and The San Francisco Bay Area. In the Bay Area, his circus performed for the opening night of San Francisco's Theater Artaud, for Jefferson Airplane's label release party, and for numerous other events.
He also made short films and books, collaborating with poets Gary Snyder, Franco Beltrametti, Joanne Kyger, Robert Duncan, Bill Berkson, and Michael McClure.
In 1977, Resta moved to the Hawaiian Islands and lived in the jungle. In Hawaii, he opened several art studios and galleries and entered into one of his most prolific periods of painting. He also opened "Villa Tamarinda," an art institute wherein he integrated cosmology, science, landscape, the human form, spirituality, the body, and art.
In the 1990s and through 2015, Resta traveled and exhibited his works in Europe, Napa, San Francisco, Connecticut, Boston, and Los Angeles. In 2017, a 40 year retrospective of his work was exhibited in the Schaefer International Gallery in Maui, Hawaii.