Serena Vestrucci’s practice excavates the interstice of everyday experience, drawing on artefacts, situations, materials and images from ordinary life — flags, crayons, fried calamari, seasonal fruit, eyeshadow, matches — and shifting them to spheres of action different from their original context. Through manual and conceptual interventions that vary from work to work, she modifies the appearance of common objects and fills them with new connotations, in a poetic that is both immediate and illusory, barely visible and yet only apparently simple. Imbued with subtle irony toward contemporaneity, her works probe the obviousness of small things, giving voice to what is often hidden, forgotten or sidelined; a sustained reflection on the time required to make a work — and on the artist’s ability to distinguish between free time and working time at all — runs through the practice as a quiet structural concern.

She earned a BFA in Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in the course taught by Alberto Garutti, and a Master in Visual Arts Design and Production at IUAV University of Venice. In 2017 she won the 18th edition of the Premio Cairo and was commissioned by the Comune di Milano to produce *Vedovelle e Draghi Verdi*, a permanent public artwork for ArtLine Milano. Her work has been presented at Museo MAXXI in Rome, Museo Madre in Naples, Palazzo Reale in Milan, GAM Milan, Stedelijk Museum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice, Fondazione Made in Cloister in Naples and the Italian Cultural Institutes in New York, London, Warsaw and Krakow. She lives and works in Milan.