Matteo Negri was born in San Donato Milanese (Milan) in 1982. He graduated in sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and lives and works in Milan. Since 2003, he has worked with numerous art galleries in Italy and abroad including Paris, London and Berlin, creating installations in public and private spaces as well as art fairs.
The artist’s creative poetics is expressed through an eclectic use of different materials, such as plastic, stone, ceramic or resin, using vibrant colors as an expressive tool. In the series of works made of lego, the well-known colored brick takes on the role of archetype of creativity. The object, which by nature allows for the possibility to build and create, ceases to be a form, and becomes a metaphor for subjectivity – l ‘ego.
The split between form and content is reminiscent of certain mechanisms of pop rhetoric that, through the magnified reproduction of objects, shifted the viewer’s attention from the original intended use of the object to the merely aesthetic seduction of the simulacrum. Matteo Negri’s L’Ego offers an opportunity for inner and individual “play”. The brick from module becomes language and is combined in multiple forms that are an expression of the artist, conveying to the viewer his personal vision of things.
