Ugo Riva was born in Bergamo on August 9, 1951. Since his youth and during his high school studies, he developed a strong interest in figurative art that soon gave way, since 1977, to the interest in sculpture to which he dedicated himself during his intense career. He attends the studio of a sculptor from Bergamo. His work of this youthful period is close to expressionistic tendencies. Subsequently, during the '80s, he moves away in favour of a more in-depth study of the classical understood as a living source and invigorating from which to draw emotions and feelings to relive and make their own. In the '90s, he has considerably thinned out in his works the references to the mythology and literature of the classical world.
The contemporaneity becomes the object of his interest, and his attention is always turned to the feelings and drives that outline a fully lived human life.
For this reason, he represents love in its infinite dimensions: sensuality, motherhood, the anguishing loneliness of the individual. From the beginning of his career, he experimented with different materials, from concrete to stone, from marble to wood, but it was with clay that he found the most excellent affinity. Thanks to its malleability, this material will allow him to represent the signs, vibrations, and passions of the subjects that inspire his sculptures.
With his subjects and his "sculpture of fragility", Riva tries to record the climate of restlessness and contradiction in which contemporary man lives, suspended between the affirmation of himself and the feeling of death. Since 1973, Ugo Riva has held more than thirty personal exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Sculptures of monumental dimension are at institutional institutions: the most recent is the crucial acquisition by the Province of Bergamo of the Imperturbable Gods, a work bought on the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to him in the spring of 2008.