Silvana De Stefano works in both the United States and Italy and is considered one of the most influential personalities among international artists. After graduating in Architecture at the University “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy, De Stefano moved to New York City where she met Leo Castelli, an art dealer and connoisseur, who recognized her potential and encouraged her to be a commissioned artist. Combining sculpture, paintings and architecture into superb synthesis, De Stefano creates suspended pieces of artwork where lightness and strength contrast. Because of De Stefano’s architectural training, these are real pieces of special architecture giving birth to unique blending of artistic and architecture.

De Stefano’s works are geometric and wide chromatic drawings which seem to challenge balance and stability: compositions that reinvent space because of the way forms are created. The artist goes to the extreme in pictorial art by considering the canvas as a tool and reversing the arrangement by means of building – dismantling first colours and then forms. De Stefano’s works in sculpture and architecture are planned the same way she plans a painting on canvas. These compound works are more than just paintings: pictorial and extra pictorial materials meet on the surface of the painting and painting becomes a process of gathering different elements, figurative and abstract, explicit and allusive combined together.

The Miracle of Lightness

Suspended Column

sculpture-installation, Rome, Italy.

An upended column, eleven meters high, installed within a courtyard, suspended at almost four meters from the ground and held up by four steel cables fixed to the top of the building, interrupted by a diagonal dividing it into two independent column-capital elements seemingly supported by water.