Omar Ronda

was born in Portula (Biella).

since he was a boy he has a strong passion for figurative arts, not yet twenty years old he devoted himself to painting and frequented the house of the director Maurizio Corgnati and his wife, the singer Milva, where he was lucky enough to participate in many discussions and literary comparisons with friends of Corgnati of the caliber of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini.  

In 1967 he founded an art gallery in Biella and with the help of Gian Enzo Sperone and Lucio Amelio organized a series of great exhibitions of the poor, Pistoletto, Kounellis, Penone, Zorio, Merz, Boetti, Paolini, Calzolari and later by Paladino, De Maria, Chia.  

In 1973/74 he spent a whole year in New York where he met Leo Castelli and Eleana Sonnabend, with them he brought to Italy the exhibitions of Rauschenberg, Warhol, Dine, Wesselmann, Twombly, Lichtenstein, Indiana, Oldemburg, up to the minimalists Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Bob Morris and others. In New York he later met and dated Basquiat and Heit Haring with whom he became closely friends. He collaborates assiduously with Giorgio Marconi in Milan and with Lucrezia De Domizio Durini in Pescara with her he organizes some conferences and exhibitions by Joseph Beuys.  

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In 1983 he decided to close the gallery to devote himself to his true great passion "creating art".

In those years he spent long periods in Sardinia and visited the Saras Petroli di Capoterra refinery in Cagliari, which affected him deeply enough to elaborate a philosophy of the materials he called Cracking Art, a philosophy that led him to look for its ancient organic and anthropological origin in oil. transform it into art with its own revolutionary operational and conceptual language.  

In 1990/91 he created extreme installations on the summit of Mont Blanc and in the caves of Is Zuddas in Sardinia and lived six days and six nights in a plant pyramid under the Catalytic Cracking reactor of the Saras Petroli refinery in Moratti.  

In 1993 he founded a group with other artists and with them he organized exhibitions and installations using plastic animals he conceived and created: Epocal in Milan in 1993, curated by Tommaso Trini and Luca Beatrice, highlights Ronda's intention to radically change history of art through a strong social and environmental commitment and the revolutionary and innovative use of different plastics and evocative of an ever closer relationship between natural life and artificial reality. Hundreds of exhibitions and events all over the world follow that give Ronda an international reputation, we mention a few:  

Cloister of Brunelleschi, Santa Maria degli Angeli (Florence), SOS maremuore, Mole Vanvitelliana (Ancona), A Thousand Dolphins in Milan, Piazza del Duomo, Arengario di Palazzo Reale, Councilor for Culture Philippe Daverio, La Posteria (Milan) and Galleria Pananti ( Florence), Official invitation and participation in the 49th Venice International Art Biennale, curator Harald Szeemann, catalogs edited by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Maurizio Sciaccaluga and Alessandro Riva.

City of Arezzo for Rudolph Giuliani's Twin Tower Found, American Embassy in Italy, All hatred in the world, Palazzo Reale (Milan) curated by Alessandro Riva, City of Vilnius, Italian Cultural Institute (Lithuania), Beaufort - Triennale D'arte del Belgium, curated by Willy Van den Bussche, Klaus Bussmann, Sul filo della lana (Biella) curated by Philippe Daverio, Museum of Santa Apollonia (Venice) on the occasion of the 51st Venice Biennale, Mazzotta catalog edited by Martina Corgnati and Elena Forin, Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art Palazzo Collicola (Spoleto) curated by Martina Corgnati, Fondazione delle Stelline (Milan) curated by Martina Corgnati, SOMA Museum, (Seoul - Korea), Chiostro del Bramante (Rome )

Tornabuoni Arte (Florence), Armanda Gori Arte (Prato), SuperNatura, Palazzo Medici Riccardi (Florence), Antonio Mazzotta Foundation (Milan) Catalog edited by Piero Adorno, Claude Lorent and Francesco Santaniello, A Bestial Exhibition, (Orio al Serio, Bergamo) speeches by Philippe Daverio and Vittorio Sgarbi, Old Port Sea (Tel Aviv - Israel).