An Italian painter, designer and sculptor, Chia travelled all over Europe and India after finishing his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1969. In 1970, he moved to Rome and, a year later, began the kind of work that he would classify as "conceptual mythical art"'. At the end of the 70s, he focused above all on painting and rapidly established himself, together with Clemente, Cucchi and Paladino, as one of the major Italian artists within the figurative painting movement, Transavanguardia. The heroic masculine figure imbued with an enigmatic sense of mission is one of the themes that Chia explores not only in his drawings and engravings, but also in his bronze casts with, at times, a strong chromatic exuberance. In 1982, he took part in Documenta 7 in Kassel and, in 1984, he held his first one-man show, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1993, he had a retrospective at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. He has been involved in numerous one-man shows and collective exhibitions in America, Japan and Europe.