born in Rome in 1951, lives and works in Milan.

The course of the artist’s experimentation has led his painting and graphics work to achieve results of a purely abstract nature and a pronounced conceptual quality.  In recent years his dialogue with contemporary philosophy has become more intense, especially with Jacques Derrida and the Italian philosopher, Remo Bodei, with whom he continues a profound exchange of ideas. 

The artist’s works revolve around determined phenomena and themes of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, such as light/darkness, presence/absence, (printed) images as traces, origin, margins or thresholds.  Aside from philosophy, music also plays an extensive and highly significant role in his work.   He often combines his exhibitions with musical events and conferences on philosophy.   

Recently in his graphic prints, Roberto Ciaccio has especially concentrated on the visual results of the process of time, on the figure/image relationship and on the idea of the “revenant” (Jacques Derrida), which also led him to address the dimensions of the auratic and the sacred, particularly in his works dedicated to the stations of the Cross.

The works on exhibition were created by Roberto Ciaccio in the laboratory and on the hand presses of the famous Milanese printer, Giorgio Upiglio.  They are particularly large works, created on plates of various metals, especially monoprints which require an experimental procedure in monotype printing techniques.  These reflect the particular dialogue between the artist and the printer, but also between the plate (the matrix) and the printed sheet.  It is precisely the complex reciprocal relationships between the matrix (the inked plate), as the origin of the image, and the printed sheet on which the image printed is manifested as the “revenant” of the matrix, that are among the phenomena which particularly interest Ciaccio. 

The exhibition hosted by the Kulturforum am Potsdamer Platz presents a complex panorama of Ciaccio’s work, from his “Annotations of Light” (1990), through the "Leçons de ténèbres," to the large plates of his “Stations of the Cross” (2006), the artist’s most recent work and the core of this exhibition 

Works by Roberto Ciaccio can be found in many important international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Museum of the Canton of Lugano (Switzerland), MART in Rovereto, Italy and The Kupferstichkabinett State Museums of Berlin.

Among his principal personal exhibitions:  Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara 1991; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Palazzo Forti, Verona 1995; Museo Nazionale San Matteo, Pisa 1997; Fondazione Mudima, Milan 2002; Hellenic American Union, Athens 2005; Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2006; Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma 2008.