Eliseo Mattiacci (b. Cagli, 1940) lives and works in Pesaro. Eliseo Mattiacci moved to Rome in 1964 and he was involved in the renewal of contemporary Italian art in the second half of the Sixties. In 1967 La Tartaruga gallery opened Mattiacci first solo exhibition, featuring “Tubo” (Tube), a 150meter, yellow-colored​, nickel-plated iron pipe that changes the perception of the environment and encourages the public to modify it. In those years the contemporary artists experienced the limit of conventional spaces along with a strong demand of unconventional fields, which drives to a greater freedom of action. The Roman gallery L’Attico-garage by Fabio Sargentini marks a turning point: Mattiacci in 1969 enters in the gallery with a compressor that crushes a path made of pozzolana earth. During the 1967 Paris Biennial, Pino Pascali introduced Mattiacci to Alexandre Jolas, gallerist and art dealer; through him Mattiacci’s work was exhibited for the first time abroad, in Paris and New York. In 1972 The International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale dedicates a solo show to the artist’s works. During the Eighties, Mattiacci’s research focuses on the use of metals – by him defined as «living» materials – for large-scale works inspired by his interests in cosmic-astronomical field. These studies are well represented through the works “Alta tensione astronomica” (Astronomical High Voltage) – realized in 1984, installed at Kunstforum Monaco – and “Carro Solare del Montefeltro” (Montefeltro Solar Chariot). The latter, along with other works, was set up in his solo show at the Venice Biennale in 1988. The artist is continuously interacting with the environment, both natural (as a quarry) and anthropic (as an archaeological site), therefore many works are site-specific. Mattiacci’s work also focuses on visible and invisible physical energies - such as gravity force and the attraction generated by large magnets - powered by a constant and ideal tension to remove weight from heavy matter. An exhibition strongly connected to this attitude is the solo exhibition hosted at the Trajan’s Markets in Rome in 2001. Among the awards received, the first prize at the 1995 Fujisankei Hokone Open Air Museum Biennial in Tokyo and in 2008 the Antonio Feltrinelli sculpture award of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. In 2016 the MART Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto organised an important retrospective show about his work.