Chia, Sandro (1946- ) , Italian painter, sculptor, and printmaker who rose to international prominence in the early 1980s with figurative work that projects a sense of heroism, both in its monumental scale and in the sweepingly illustrated tales that make up its content. Chia was born in Florence, Italy, and received classical art training at the Florence Institute of Art from 1962 to 1967 and at Florence's Academy of Fine Arts from 1967 to 1969.
Chia moved to Rome in 1970, where his work came to the attention of gallery owner Gian Enzo Sperone, who also represented Italian artists Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Mimmo Paladino. Together with Chia, these artists—who became known as the Italian transavantgarde—departed from the cool, intellectual approach that had been prevalent in the 1970s and looked to more distant sources for the new figurative direction of their artwork. They became the focus of international attention in the 1980s with the emergence of a new movement in painting dubbed neoexpressionism. In addition to these Italian artists, the movement included American artists Julian Schnabel and David Salle and German artists Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, all of whom produced similarly figurative work.

Chia exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale exhibition and at Sperone's gallery in New York City the same year, the period in which the first of the American neoexpressionists were gaining recognition. Chia's paintings of the 1980s are full of visual quotations from the work of earlier artists, especially Russian-born French artist Marc Chagall, as well as the German Expressionists and Italian Futurists of the early 20th century (see Painting: Expressionism; and Futurism).

Chia's figures are typically large yet appear surprisingly buoyant and are rendered in vivid colors with lively brush strokes. His work draws on the past with an irreverent sense of humor, as is evident in Three Boys on a Raft (1983, Collection PaineWebber Group, Inc., New York City), which caricatures Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819, Louvre Museum, Paris, France), a famous monumental painting by French romantic artist Théodore Géricault.