Oliviero Rainaldi - Battesimi Umani (1998)

Oliviero Rainaldi, born in 1956 in Caramanico Terme, is one of the most significant voices in contemporary Italian sculpture. Trained between Venice, under Emilio Vedova, and L'Aquila, under Fabio Mauri, he has built a language centred on the human figure as a place of spirituality and meditation: hieratic bodies, silent fragments, forms that belong simultaneously to archaic, medieval and liturgical traditions. His work has been shown at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Villa Pisani in Venice, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai and the Petronas Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, and installed in monumental contexts including the Tempietto del Bramante, the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples, the DIFC in Dubai and Villa Adriana. He has received numerous public and religious commissions, among them the sculpture dedicated to John Paul II in Rome, and was named Academician of the Virtuosi del Pantheon by the pontiff himself.

Battesimi Umani, executed in 1998, is one of the most emblematic works of his poetics, where the figure becomes the emblem of an inner process of purification and rebirth. The body appears hieratic, fragile and silent, suspended in an atemporal dimension; the plaster, a raw and luminous material, heightens the vulnerability of the form, as if the figure were still waiting to be completed by the thought of the observer. The work was exhibited in 2024 in the solo exhibition Anima e Corpo at 21 Gallery in Treviso, a path traced between sculpture and spirituality that met with the consensus of collectors, curators and an international public.

As a unique plaster from the artist's most recognised production, with museum exhibition history and institutional presence behind it, the piece belongs to that segment of Rainaldi's output where symbolic force and material uniqueness coincide. Institutional holdings of his work include the Vatican, the Quirinale, the Palazzo dell'ONU in Geneva, the Nobel Prize headquarters in Stockholm and the Soumaya Foundation in Mexico City.