page_title: Pier Augusto Breccia
section_title: A turning point: from the bistoury to a pencil
hierarchical_section_title: Pier Augusto Breccia / A turning point: from the bistoury to a pencil
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Pier Augusto Breccia in Saint Petersburg at the Manege Museum in 2011
context_page_description: Pier Augusto Breccia was an Italian artist, philosopher and short story writer.
  Breccia's artistic works explore the human being with a hermeneutic approach and engage in a variety of philosophical themes. Breccia's oeuvre consists of oil paintings, pencil and oil pastel drawings, 7 books, 10 short stories and numerous other works. Breccia has held around 80 one-man shows all over the world.
context_section_description: It was in 1977 during a summer holiday, when, Pier Augusto discovered an unknown skill for drawing and fascinated by his new-found talent, in the following two years, Breccia practiced drawing, which yet remained nothing more than a hobby. However, in 1979, after the death of his father Angelo, his drawing talent found a creative expression . The deep interest in Classics of his youth, matured by his human experience of fifteen years of medical life, re-emerged anew. In the following two years, he prepared his ‘opera prima’, Oltreomega (Beyond Omega), a book of drawings and philosophical thoughts, presented in October 1981 by the Italian critic and poet Cesare Vivaldi, the Director of the Fine Art Academy of Rome. The work was received with critical and public acclaim.
  Between 1981 and 1983, Breccia held a number of exhibitions in Italy and abroad (‘Choral Monologue’, ‘The concrete shapes of the non-existent’, ‘The Semantics of Silence’), and his new involvement as an artist became so absorbing that, in August 1983, Breccia took a leave of absence from his medical position. During the next two years, his artistic style, which Breccia called "ideomorphic", became more defined, as well as his aesthetic philosophy, which he presented in his 1984 book, “L’Eterno Mortale”. He resigned his position as a surgeon in 1985, when he had two consecutive exhibitions in New York, in the Gucci Gallery and the Arras Gallery. His new career, which Breccia felt more as a “mission” , developed rapidly and as he resigned as a surgeon, he moved to New York where he spent most of his time between 1985-96. During this period, he had exhibitions throughout the United States, in New York, Columbus, Santa Fe, Miami and Houston.
  From the very beginning of his journey as an artist, Breccia was extremely prolific. His first ten years of artistic production and philosophic reflections were presented in his 1992 book, “Animus-Anima”, a monumental work, “densely reasoned and rigidly philosophic” which includes 500 images of his paintings and reveals with great lucidity the theoretical postulates of Ideomorphism.
  In 1996, Breccia moved back to Rome, from where he exhibited throughout Italy (Palazzo dei Papi, Viterbo,1997; Vittoriano, Rome, 2002; Palazzo Ziino, Palermo, 2004; Palazzo dei Sette, Orvieto, 2000 and 2007; Palazzo Venezia, Rome, 2007; Rocca Paolina, Perugia, 2010; Fortezza, Montepulciano, 2012) and throughout Europe (Zurich, Brussels, Nice, Montecarlo and Saint Petersburg). In 1996, Breccia wrote "The Other Book", which includes more than a hundred unpublished images from 1991 to 1999 and visionary short stories, critical self reflections and other reflections on the meaning of art and life.  In 1999, he wrote “The suspended language of the Self-consciousness” and in 2004 he published “Introduction to Hermeneutic Painting”, his art Manifesto.
  On November 17, 2017, two weeks after his last exhibition in Trento, Breccia suffered a heart attack (a third one from 1998) in his studio in Rome; he was taken to the Gemelli Hospital, the same where, forty years earlier, he had devoted himself as a heart surgeon. On Monday, November 20, 2017, Pier Augusto Breccia died at the age of seventy-four. 
  Throughout his career as an artist, Breccia held around 80 solo exhibitions, and produced works purchased by collectors all over the world.
caption: Pier Augusto Breccia. Exhibition: "Hermeneutic Painting", Manege Museum, Saint Petersburg, 2011.
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