Paul Pavia was 12 years old when he made his first sculpture. Born in 1971 to an art family, he had already been drawing for six years by then. His paternal grandfather was a stone carver. His late father was the sculptor Phillip Pavia, a key figure in New York City’s Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940s. His mother is the painter Natalie Edgar, who also served as an art critic for Art News from 1960–73.

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Classically trained in Pietrasanta, Italy — a European center for sculpture known as the “City of Artists” — Pavia studied stone carving and bronze-casting with local artisans every summer from 1986–98. After working at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 1989, he enrolled at Binghamton University. An art and philosophy major, he was drawn to existentialist concepts of the mind’s sense of self and its relationship to the material world — ideas he explored sculpturally in welded steel. Upon graduation, he had his first solo show in 1996 at the Millennium Gallery in East Hampton, New York.

By 1994, however, he had already began welding and patinating bronze to broaden his aesthetic range. He spent the next decade showing in New York City and East Hampton. In 2010, he started incorporating other media into his bronzework — primarily marble and wood — and sculpting entirely in wood. By 2011, his fascination with simple yet unique metaphysical space had created a body of work the Long Island Pulse described as “honest, blunt, like punk rock, but as inventive and mysterious as jazz.” In 2017, he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant for sculpture. He divides his time between East Hampton and New York City.

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