Giovanni Intra

Giovanni Intra (May 1968 – 17 December 2002) was an artist, writer, and art dealer who moved from his native New Zealand to the United States in 1996.

Intra was born in Auckland in 1968 and grew up in Turangi, a small town in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, and Auckland. He studied at the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1990 and a Master of Fine Art in 1993. Curator Robert Leonard has described him as a 'precocious student': he established a reputation as a conceptual painter while still in his teens.

Intra was fascinated by Surrealist photography, such as the work of Jacques-André Boiffard, who was also a medical photographer. In his art work he investigated medicine, which he saw to have replaced religion as a source of hope for modern day society, and the frailties of the human body.

Intra was also part of a collective of artists that established the influential Auckland artist-run space Teststrip in 1992.

In 1996 Intra was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and travelled to Los Angeles to study at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He completed a master's degree in Critical Studies in 2001. His thesis was based on Daniel Paul Schreber's 1903 book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), and used texts by artists including Salvador Dalí and Robert Smithson to "suggest ways that art writing might be reinvented."

Intra began writing about art for a magazine named Stamp while at art school in Auckland. At the time of his death Intra was West Coast editor for Art and Text, and helped edit the magazine Semiotext; his writing was published in Tema Celeste, Artforum, Bookforum and Flash Art.

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