Maurizio Anzeri

Maurizio Anzeri is an Italian contemporary artist living and working in London. He works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, drawing and traditional craft techniques.

Anzeri is described as a pioneer in the art of embroidery on found photographs. The inspiration for his craft came from seeing images of relatives mending fishing nets on the Italian coast of Loano, near Genoa. Fusing his earlier work with hair sculpture and his passion for old photographs, embroidery became a deliberately expressive tool for his work.

In 2011 Anzeri held his first solo show in a major UK institution at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, “Family Day”. The Baltic Gallery press release described the exhibition: “Using individual and group portraits of unknown people of the 1930s and 1940s found in flea markets, Anzeri overlays meticulously patterned coloured threads by stitching and sewing directly on to the photographic surface. Obscuring part of the photograph, he both hides and heightens features of the face. These intricate additions create something almost three-dimensional, transforming flat images in to objects with a charged psychological presence. Anzeri draws upon a wide range of influences including contemporary fashion, voodoo ceremonies and surrealist imagery. Precise juxtapositions in his work recall the collage of the Surrealists and the photomontages of German Dadaists Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann”.

Anzeri’s art works are held in public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Saatchi Collection, the Fondazione Agnelli, the Shanghai Gallery of Art, the Gagosian Collection; the Rothschild Collection; the Ivor Braka Collection, the Statoil Collection, the Missoni Collection, The Museum Of Everything, Museo Cantonale, Museum Kunstpalast and Pier24 Photography.