Born in Alba (Cuneo) in 1942, Riccardo Cordero attended the Art School in Turin and the Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated in 1965 and where from 1990 to 2002 he was professor of the Sculpture School.

 Among his teachers, Sandro Cherchi for sculpture and anatomy Franco Garelli, sculptor, as well as doctor, to which shall be bound in the following years by deep friendship.

 His first public appearance was in 1960, at the 120th position of the Company Promoter of Fine Arts in Turin, in a phase of re-discussion statutory art that also involves the sculpture. In that year Michel Tapiè, among the most important critics of that trend, opened in Turin the International Center of Aesthetic Researc (ICAR). Naturally the interest of the young student, who in his paintings look Informal, albeit then in decline, and soon sees in it the possibility of exceeding the cautious scanning neocubisteggiante volume and vibration of Cherchi surfaces, as always in 1960 , attests to one of his first works, Crucifixion. In it already seems to recognize the interest in Umberto Milani in reducing the image in a bas-relief and corroded matterism. Of course then Cordero was also being hit by the Lucio Fontana's spatial concepts and Nature, like his other young colleagues who were trying to make a sculpture "new" adhering to the new times.

 Sculptor by vocation, Cordero selects its interests with early lucidity, looking among other things, as evidenced by his works of the early sixties, as well as back to Fontana, to three-dimensional works of Milani, which offered new possibilities in the relationship between volumes plastic and space, the core of the sculpture, as Cordero includes early, ushering in what will be the first register of all his long journey.

 On this line, the attention to Garelli, well attested by the first tests of Cordero.

 Soon, however, the artist puts on a front "beyond the informal ', on the wire, also thematic, of the contemporary appeal, shaping between 1964 and 1965 colorful figures in the round, between pop and superhero snowman, astronauts and baseball players and football, which make their appearance in 1966 in the prestigious Galleria Ferrari di Verona. But this is a breakthrough provisional.

 Just one year after Cordero transfers the need for a sculpture in tune with their time in research, which will last until 1969-1970 and beyond, on colored mixed media assemblages, also stimulated by Garelli developments in tubes, exposed at the Venice Biennale in 1966, as well as an original reinterpretation of previous historical avant-gardes, in particular the Futurist Boccioni of the "interpenetration of the plans." The experimentation and the use of multiple materials, including industrial, are crucial, besides the color, in these works exhibited in 1968 in Turin in the Triad gallery with an important critical introduction by Paolo Fossati and a year later in Rome in Two Gallery worlds in the fourth edition of perspectives, an exhibition dedicated to emerging young people throughout Italy, presented by various critics. Cordero is accompanied by Enrico Crispolti, who writes in the catalog.

 Attendance at national and international group exhibitions become more numerous.

 Among the main, in 1966 the Biennale of Sonsbeek, in Holland, in 1967 the Third International Sculpture Exhibition in Pagani in Legnano Foundation, which Cordero is also participating in the following year, and in 1969 the San Fedele Prize in Milan, the IV International prize in Torre Pellice design, exposure Five in Turin in the Kaleidoscope Gallery of Padua.

 In 1970 Paolo Fossati reports on the Catalog Bolaffi.

 Meanwhile, since 1969, Cordero realizes its buildings and its assembly in the environmental scale that will become more and more congenial, already tested in large scale in 1975 in the monumental earth-moon 650x420x250 cm, enameled iron and polyester, installed in the garden the Middle School Rozzano (Milan), the first major public commissions that will allow it to intervene on important areas, with urban qualification goals, ever more pressing in its activities.

 These experiences are presented in solo and group exhibitions in prominent, in Italy and abroad. Among the personal ones, in 1971 in Novara in Gallery L4, in Genoa in UNIMEDIA Gallery and San Remo in Benjamin, in 1973 in Brussels in the Gallery Philippe Chabeau Gallery, in 1975 in Turin in Gallery Archipelago, in 1977 in Milan in Ada Gallery Zunino. Among the group, in 1972 the IX Biennial of Menton, in 1974 the Fifth Quadrennial of Turin, in 1975 the VIII metal Biennale of Gubbio and the X Biennial bronze in Padua.

 In 1977 the artist breaks the most self-research on the shape and space to probe for nearly a decade the potential figurative image. Therefore not a complete fracture nor a regressive return to the statue, but a revisiting "educated" tradition, even in the manual, in the matter and in the techniques, in a climate broadly postmodern. Even these experiences, branched, and thematically bets mainly on the female nude, have great luck: criticism, even from writers such as Giovanni Arpino, and exhibitions in private galleries (La Bussola in Turin in 1979, the still Parisina in Turin in 1982, Cinquetti in Verona in 1983 and Gallery 32 in Milan in 1984), public institutions (Italian Institute of Culture in Monaco of Bavaria in 1984), national and international exhibitions (national Award Gallery of Modern Art of Gallarate 1979 Promoter of Turin in 1980 and 1983 , Biennial art of the City of Milan in 1984 and 1987 Biennial Sculpture Asti 1986 Beeldhouwkunst Engels, JL Gallery 1982 Westminster City Sculpture Competition, Cutt Cutt & Bank, London in 1987 and especially the XLIII Venice Biennale in 1978, with a staff room, early recognition and high profile).

 Between 1985 and 1987 Cordero, through further experimentation on the theme of the landscape, he comes to building new facilities for their physical and determination of signs and their giving actually, even physical, space, activated, and thus made present, not evoked, from the plastic form. This opens the final maturity of the artist, which was announced in late 1988 in the exhibition Two Sculptures, in Turin at the Cultural Association The Salmon Leap, which proposed only two sculptures, November and Black in the landscape, where you could see the 'start of the long and increasingly fertile season that led Cordero of the major international sculptors with its increasingly peremptory structures, which enhance the possibility of a coherent sculpture with the development of today's culture, sought by the artist around the his creative itinerary, marked especially the interrelationship between strictly designed plastic structures and together open and articulate, and even environmental space. As in an impressive series of monumental results that have nothing to do with the rhetoric and the academicism of the statues and the monument: the coordinated rotation of Pellerina the Park 1992 Turin and the Big Iron 1993 Lookout Sculpture Foundation, in Pensylvania, to Cenisia Fontana in 1994 for Cenisia Park of Turin, Stuttgart 1995, in Great Sign of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Alba and Presence of 1997, Chakra (wooden) 1998, New presences, 2000 to the most recent giants of 2005-2006 Chakra to Galimberti Square in Turin, Meteora for the New Palace of Justice in Asti, Meteora for the Sculpture Park Shanghai Sculpture Park and Comet for Taiwan. Always numerous and important solo exhibitions, such as in 2000 In the Same Space, Cordero King Venet at the Automobile Museum in Turin and in 2005 Du Projet à la Réalisation at Galerie quai des arts in Vevey (Switzerland) and investments a group which, in 2002 International sculpture in the herd at the Villa dei Laghi in Venaria Reale (Torino), in 2005 at the XIV Quadrennial of Rome, the Rome National Gallery of modern art, and in 2006 at the XXIV Biennial sculpture - City Gubbio.

 In 2006, the Piedmont Region devotes a large staff, Riccardo Cordero, 1960-2007 works at the Bolaffi room in Turin, shows that will reach first, the Museo de la Universidad de Alicante in Spain and later in three locations Institutional America Latin which the Municipalidad of Montevideo, Uruguay, at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires in Argentina and finally to Memorial da America Latina, Sao Paulo in Brazil.

 Again won national competitions for public works of art to be installed in public spaces, in 2007 realizes Dragonfly, corten steel, for the New Court of Appeal of Rome, and in 2009 the Group Command, bronze, for the New Headquarters of 'Carabinieri in Aosta.

 It continues the exhibition activity in 2012 with a spectacular exhibition Macromondi Spezzati, of monumental works, curated by Luciano Caramel, located within the walls of the Castle of Pergine followed in 2013 the large retrospective exhibition of the Iron Giant 1960-2013, edited by Martina Corgnati, at the Spinning Wheel and the Capuchin Monastery in Caraglio in the province of Cuneo.

 Internationally, since 2006, it operates in China, where in 2013 he produced for the city of Wuhu, a second version of corten steel sculpture of Chakra.

 Since 1994 he has been President of the Piedmont Arts Association.

... From the catalog presentation by Luciano Caramel, shows Bolaffi in Turin, 2006