Vanni Cuoghi’s practice combines painting, watercolour, ceramics and large-scale architectural intervention in a register that draws on Baroque decoration, fairy-tale illustration and dark folkloric storytelling. His figures appear to step out of an old book of children’s tales from which the happy ending has been removed: characters and details in finely worked colour populate enigmatic micro-worlds set within architectures and theatres of paper, while monumental fresco cycles re-read the great decorative tradition through a contemporary lens. Stylistic references move freely from Italian and Northern European late-medieval painting through Symbolism to Pop and Neo-figuration, held together by a meticulous draughtsmanship and a recurrent attraction to the grotesque, the courtly and the marvellous.

He trained in Decorative Painting at the Istituto Statale d’Arte in Chiavari and in Stage Design at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. From 2002 onwards he has decorated and frescoed interiors and façades of churches and historic palazzi — most notably the entire façade of the church of Santa Caterina da Genova in 2008. He has participated in the 54th Venice Biennale (Padiglione Italia, 2011) and in the collateral project *Italia Docet* of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and has held solo exhibitions at the Museo Francesco Messina in Milan, the Museo Ebraico in Bologna, the Musei Civici in Crema and the Fondazione Tito Balestra in Longiano, alongside galleries in Italy, Hong Kong and beyond. He lives and works in Milan.