Sandro Chia (born 20 April 1946) is an Italian painter and sculptor.^[2] In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was, with Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria, and Mimmo Paladino, a principal member of the Italian Neo-Expressionist movement which was baptised Transavanguardia by Achille Bonito Oliva.^[3]

Chia was born in Florence, in Tuscany in central Italy, on 20 April 1946. He studied at the Istituto d'Arte di Firenze [it] from 1962 to 1967,^[1] and then, until 1969, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze.^[2] He then travelled in Europe, in Turkey and in India.^[4][5] He settled in Rome in 1970, and began to show work in the following year.^[4][5] He spent the winter of 1980–1981 in Mönchengladbach, in Nordrhein-Westfalen in West Germany, on a study grant.^[2] Later that year he moved to New York in the United States, where he lived for more than twenty years.^[4][6] In 1984–1985 he taught at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.^[1]

Chia's early work tended towards Conceptualism, but from the mid-1970s he began to turn towards more a figurative approach.^[4][5] In June 1979 Paul Maenz [de] showed work by Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino at his gallery in Cologne, in Germany.^[7] In an article in Flash Art in the same year, the critic Achille Bonito Oliva characterised the group as a new art movement, which he called "Transavanguardia".^[7]

His work has been exhibited in a solo or group shows in a number of museums, among them: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1983; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984; the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1992; the Villa Medici in Rome in 1995; the Magazzini del Sale in Siena in 1997; the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea [it] in Trento in 2000; Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 2002; the Duomo of Sant'Agostino in Pietrasanta in 2007; and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome in 2009–2010.^[4] He participated in the Biennale di Venezia in 1984 and 1988.^[4]