Mauro Staccioli was born in Volterra in 1937, and has lived and worked in Milan since 1968.
Since the Sixties he has produced large-scale pieces in public spaces, which reinterpret the form and history of those places (his first important city-scale piece was produced in Volterra in 1972). In the Sixties he produced pieces for several public squares and streets in cities such as Parma, Turin and Milan, and in historical places such as the centre of Volterra, the Visconteo Castle in a Vigevano, and the Rotonda di San Lorenzo in Mantova. From now to the beginning of the new century, he has shows planned in major public and private galleries in Milan, Rome, Mantua, Padua, Parma, Brussels, Los Angeles and San Diego.
He was invited to the Venice Biennale in 1978, where he constructed a wall eight metres square at the entrance to the Castle Gardens. In the Eighties Sironi extended his creative activities beyond the urban sphere, to a wide series of cultural and spatial situations. He softened the aggressive tone of his earlier work and developed the relationship of his sculptures with different settings in a somewhat freer way. In 1982 he worked in the sculpture park in the Fattoria di Celle in Santomato di Pistoia, in Tuscany, where the most up-to-the-minute European and American work was being displayed. In the same year he produced a sculpture for the entrance steps of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.
In 1984 he had his first exhibitions in the United States, first at the University of Massachusetts, and then at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. He had a show at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan, and in 1988 produced the sculpture for the new Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, in Tuscany. In the same year he took part in the International Sculpture Symposium organised in Seoul on the occasion of the Olympic Games, producing an enormous sculpture for the Olympic Park square. At the end of the Eighties, he designed and produced a series of permanent installations in the park of the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside (near San Francisco). During the Nineties, in the run-up to the new century, Staccioli continued to create sculptures and installations in Europe (in Brussels, for the European Foundation for Sculpture), America and Korea. He was developing new themes, such as suspended equilibrium, dynamism in time and space, the relationship with both nature and urban surroundings, and the interpretation of historical places.