Michele Zaza was born in Molfetta on 7 November 1948. He attended the Institute of Fine Arts of Bari and in 1967 he enrolled in the Sculpture course given by Marino Marini at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, where he obtained his diploma in 1971.
Zaza’s work is essentially based on the idea that “art does not offer alternative possibilities to the human condition, but on the contrary is the result of this condition” and, as such, is perpetuated in human thought. With the cycle Cristologia [Christology], presented in 1972 at the Galleria Diagramma/Inga-Pin in Milan, the artist was concerned with “commenting”, through a figurative repertoire, on the false liberty that exists between the individual and various powers.
In January 1973 Zaza began working on the cycle Dissidenza ignota [Dissidence Unknown]. The main work is the artist’s mother who is about to fall asleep between a pistol placed on a pile of cotton wool and a sequence of images of the woman during various moments of her daily life.
In 1974, his works entitled Naufragio euforico [Euphoric shipwreck]and Sisifo ritrovato madre e figlio [Sisyphus rediscovered mother and son]highlighted the contradictory aspect of the concept of freedom in the form of a “one-way” journey. Other works made at the same time include the sequence La felicità e il dovere nella ripetizione omologata [Happiness and obligation in approved repetition], a work consisting of eighteen photographs in which two individuals (the artist and his mother) mime the same gestures in a sequence broken up by the presence of a book and a television. In Spazio del verbo essere [Space of the verb to be], on the other hand, the same characters act within the space of a locked door.
The Mimesis cycle followed in 1975. In his works done in 1974-75, the artist’s parents hold up a soft pile of grey matter in the form of lobes, placing themselves in the centre between the presence of bread and that of stone, in other words of culture and nature respectively. In some works, the artist appears hanging from his head down, while he describes a complete arc of 360 degrees. Existence and absence, time and death, the human condition and artistic practice are compared with each other. From 1976 the unreal was no longer regarded as being in contradiction with reality. Indeed, it constituted a form of reality in the process of becoming, made up of strange landscapes of soil and cotton wool, inhabited by small paper objects that resemble flying cars.
The series Anamnesi was presented at Rome: the works consist of two small photos in the corners of the walls where the characters seem to act as if in a dream, feeding on breadcrumbs. In 1976 Zaza also made the cycle Universo estraneo [Extraneous universe]for the Lucio Amelio Gallery in Naples, and subsequently Fantasia privata [Private fantasy]in Paris. In 1978 the artist made works entitled Racconto celeste [Celestial Tale], in which he analyses the immaterial. The colour blue of the wall covered by breadcrumb-stars is a sky that enshrouds the faces of his father and his mother. The residential space becomes a “celestial space”.
In 1980, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, Zaza exhibited Neo-terrestre [Neo-terrestrial], echoing the allusions to the “germinating” earth, the place where colourful sculptures and forms of cotton wool grow. The faces appear to be frontal or rotating. This work was followed the same year by the cycle Itinerari [Itineraries].
In 1980 Zaza was invited to the Venice Biennale where a room was devoted exclusively to his work. The following year he was in Paris where a solo show of his work was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
In 1991 he exhibited at the Cabinet des estampes du Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. In 1996, he presented a series of new works inspired by Hölderlin at the Shchusev Architecture Museum in Moscow.
In 1977 and in 1982 Zaza was invited to Documenta (Kassel); in 1975 he was invited to the Paris Biennale and in 1977 to the 14th São Paolo Biennial.
Beginning in the 1980s, Zaza began to add sculptural elements to his works: an example is Paesaggio [Landscape], in which several forms similar to birds appear next to photographs. He also produced a significant series of works entitled Cielo abitato [Inhabited sky].
Towards the mid-1990s, the work of Michele Zaza developed several important characteristics which were aptly summarised by Rainer Michael Mason: “The earlier works of Michele Zaza were theatre that had personal, familiar, intellectual and existential qualities, a sort of chamber performance. By comparison his more recent works are monumental and, since 1996, have adopted a form which is more abstract but simultaneously simpler and more encoded. They focus on the face, they operate in the foreground, they are composed with sculptural forms with a Cycladic appearance (only photographed)”.
In his photographic works of the 1990s, Zaza transfigured faces by applying colour fields that emphasise certain focal points such as the forehead, the nose and the hands which underpin vital functions. Since 1996 the frontal nature of the works portrayed in the foreground and even the titles of the works themselves refer to the tradition of icons. The face is the gateway towards inner worlds to be explored. The body and the face acquire a central role, becoming an interface with the world: they cautiously confront each other in “hand-to-hand combat” with an abstract (object-like) image, with another body from whose symbiosis a unique “metaphysical” dimension, a superior reality, is generated.
During the 1990s Zaza relaunched a totalising “space-body” project which unified opposites. This project created an ideal opening for depicting a timeless, symbolic body. Indeed, in 1997 Michele Zaza wrote: “Birth and death embody the battle of humanity. Birth and death constitute the two extreme stages of existence: to ensure that death no longer exists, there must be no more births. Ideally, the evocation, re-composition and incarnation of a lost unity encourage the mind to rebel against the idea of male and female. Becoming a uterus, the primary source of procreative energy, has the value of absolute autonomy and, at the same time, of unifying multi-dimensionality. It is a totality of being which, on the basis of beauty and tenderness, makes it possible to conceive of a new heroic body”.
Zaza’s heroic body becomes a “traveller” that proceeds in the direction of his own origins, albeit imaginative, in a “return towards himself”, in other words towards the archetype. Works such as the Centro del viaggiatore, Cercatemi altrove, Paesaggio segreto and Corpo magico [Centre of the traveller, Search for me elsewhere, Secret landscape and Magic body]establish an exchange between human intimacy and the cosmos through sculptures made from cardboard and cotton wool with which the artist transfigures his own body enveloped by lighting effects. Even the scale of the works and their arrangement in the exhibition space seem designed to create a presence that tends to occupy the entire space, an enlargement of feeling towards the universe.
Zaza manages to devise an atmosphere laden with symbols, in which the body or the face come into contact with a secret scenario, created from elements taken from everyday life (breadcrumbs, cotton wool, cushions) and from archetypal sculptural presences. The male or female face is often painted with colours that allude to the earth or sky – brown, blue and white. His most recent works Rivelazione segreta [Secret revelation]and Corpo segreto [Secret body], 2005, Paesaggio magico [Magic landscape]and Orizzonte segreto [Secret horizon], 2006, and Io sono il paesaggio [I am the landscape], 2007, are exemplary.
In Zaza’s art, photography is not purely the “evidence” of an objective reality, but always a “creation” of reality. Behind a “cushion with mysterious signs”, the image returns to being prophetic of a “transfer” that ranges from dream to unexpected, constantly renewed imagination. With his hands clenched or covering his face, the artist mimes magic gestures, opening up the entire vision to “traces” of an unknown existence, in other words to mystery.
He explored the notion of an alternative “universe” to everyday reality, through the abstraction of breadcrumbs on the walls to form a field of celestial bodies and elements, and through the motif of soap bubbles blown by the father and the son in Universo estraneo [Extraneous universe], subsequently depicting images of his own face and that of his wife in Cielo abitato [Inhabited sky], which identify with the sky, becoming celestial bodies themselves (the white and blue represent the sky, while the poses respond to the motif of the rotation and motion of the planets, to the movement of the cosmos). Zaza changes his approach towards the end of the 2000s, coming up with the concept of “cosmic space” where the invented cosmos, imagined through the elaboration and transfiguration of the elements of life, is configured with the depth of video-portraits in settings painted entirely in ultramarine blue or on silhouettes of red oxide painted directly on the wall, accompanied by abstract signs made with breadcrumbs, no longer photographed but presented in all their objective plasticity.
His works are on display in various public collections including the following: Fondation Emanuel Hoffmann, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung (Basel); Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart (Berlin); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Centre Georges Pompidou e Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris); Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart); Museum of contemporary art (Tehran); Kunsthaus (Zurich).