Lucia Cristiani’s practice unfolds across drawing, sculpture, site-specific installation and video, taking the landscape — political, historical and personal — as a starting point for an ongoing investigation of identity and the body. Her work draws on the reworking of individual and collective narratives as devices for the construction of selfhood, with a long-standing relationship with the city of Sarajevo and the Balkan cultures playing a structural role: brutalist references, displaced symbols and a sense of geographic in-betweenness recur as visual constants. Materials such as blown glass, marble and tin are used to crystallise affect and memory into objects that behave as fragments of a wider, unresolved territory.

She earned a BFA in Painting and an MFA in Visual Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. Her work has been presented at Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, Toast Project Space – Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence, Fondazione ICA in Milan, MART in Rovereto, Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Fondazione Elpis in Milan and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti in Verona. In 2017 she won the LEVEL 0 – ArtVerona prize, and she has held residencies including BoCs Art (Cosenza, 2018) and ArteVisione (Careof and Sky Arte, with Omer Fast, Milan, 2017). She lives and works between Milan and Sarajevo.