With a clear-cut painting, without hyper-realistic structuralism, Barbara Pietrasanta plays out a constant game of displacements, situations and meanings, of exchanges of roles between the Artist who paints and the subject represented, in which only painting is in a position of strength.
Director of Arte magazine
In her pictorial research the artist brings into play all the main themes linked to a profound sense of life, of the relationship between men and women and in particular of the perplexing question of individual identity.
Art critic
Barbara Pietrasanta is an Italian artist and communication designer, graduating in Sculpture from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. She lived and worked in New York in the 1980s, holding her first exhibitions in the West Broadway galleries. Her artistic research unfolds through oil painting on canvas and fresco. Her main painterly cycles, Shipwrecks, Awakening, Risvegli and Elsewhere, explore the female figure, identity and the contemporary condition. Her works are held in the Collezione Farnesina in Rome, the Museo della Permanente in Milan, the collection of the Provincia di Milano at Palazzo Isimbardi, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New Delhi, the M.I.M.A.C. Museo Internazionale di Arte Mariana in Alessano, the MUD Museo del Fango in Messina and the Palazzo Comunale di Tricase. She teaches Communication Design in the Master’s programmes at the Politecnico di Milano. She has served as Vice President of Triennale Design Museum, member of the Board of the Fondazione Achille Castiglioni and of the Board of Directors of the Museo della Permanente in Milan. In 2017 and 2018 she was appointed Ambassador of the Italian Design Day by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. She is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Artepassante and of the jury of the Premio Morlotti 2026.
I define myself as a communicating artist because I work with art, communication, and visual languages. In my poetics, these aspects are constantly in dialogue with one another, shaping an all-encompassing vision of the contemporary world.
I began working as an Art Director in the 1980s, when the advertising world was rapidly expanding and there was a great sense of excitement—no computers, but plenty of hands-on work with brushes and colors that set ideas in motion. A turning point came when I decided to leave for New York, where I lived for several years, because that was where things were happening—long before they reached us. For me, that was real professional development: not sitting in Master’s programs, but learning “on the road.” To support myself, I did everything from waitressing at Caffè Dante in the Village to working as an illustrator for Uptown agencies, in that city where anything could happen—such as seeing Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat sparring in a boxing ring, or being served at your table by Madonna in an East Side club.
It was there that I defined my artistic path, with subjects charged with ambiguity and contradiction, and it was there that I held my first exhibitions, in the galleries of West Broadway. I also created several frescoes in Connecticut using the original technique I learned from an artist from Molise who had lived with the Oglala Native Americans
