There is a very strong affinity between the disciplines of painting and writing. Like a dancer following a choreography, the hand moves on the canvas or on the blank page, creating or discovering new realities and unexpected dimensions. My work is multidisciplinary, but I’m essentially a painter, or rather, as I like to call myself, a painter who writes or a writer who paints.

I educate my hands and my mind as a painter, and I mix media like I mix colours. I’m strongly influenced by nature and landscape and fascinated by the immersive power of storytelling: I’ve developed a body of work which deftly subverts the perceived boundaries between representation and abstraction, and I like to investigate things on the edge, those without a name, which sometimes turn into something else.

Studying architecture at the Institute of Architecture in Venice, I had the opportunity to get in touch with the artistic world of this prolific town and its Biennale and I had many collaborations with international artists, developing a curiosity for sculpture and installation as well, learning the power of materials and lights and the theatrical relationship between artworks and space.

Bio.

Silvia Righetti is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, and creative director, currently living and working between London, Berlin, and Italy.

Silvia divides her time somewhat between international collaborations in the context of multidisciplinary artistic projects related to architecture, set design, and sculpture, and on the other hand, a more intimate artistic practice, where she explores the subtle boundaries between everyday life, memory, and the dream state through writing and painting and where she systematically uses hypnotherapy to incorporate elements of science and psychology into her language.

Born on Lake Garda (Italy), she has discovered the passion for writing and painting very young. After being trained by the painter Maurizio Zanolli and participating in many local exhibitions, she moved to Venice, where she graduated in Architecture with a specialisation in Immersive Theatre from IUAV and she began collaborating with artists and architects on multidisciplinary projects, ranging from visual arts to set design, from sculpture to multimedia installations. Her first significant experience was in Paris, where she studied on a scholarship, collaborating with French artist and set designer Gérard Cholot on a multimedia installation of light, glass, and video at the Perrier factory in Nimes.

Returning to Venice, she wrote, directed and took part in her first performance, Egg-O for the project Social Sculpture No. 2, organised by the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, for the “Symposium on the Love” at the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove – a food act about love and identity. Then, she developed a video mapping project of the Island of Giudecca, presented at the Academy of Fine Arts, and she participated in the Linea D’Acqua Art Festival in Fondamenta della Misericordia, with the digital installation ‘Iotu Dance’, a visual representation on movements and sensuality between the Self and the Other in the space of relationship.

Her decade-long collaboration with the multidisciplinary studio of sculptor and light artist Federica Marangoni has been particularly important, and Silvia has been able to come into contact with new materials, explore new technologies, and deepen the practice and spatial study of the Work of Art, between site specific installations, setting up in galleries and museums and production of publications, books and catalogues.

In 2005, she moved to New York, where she began collaborating with Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen and Italian American artist Angiola Churchill, then head of the Department of Arts and Art Professions at New York University (NYU) and founder and director of the New York University Studio Art Program in Venice, Italy. With Angiola, she worked on the installation and publication of the major exhibition White Space at the Palazzo Reale in Naples, and with Kaarina, she co-curated a proposal for a floating installation for the 2015 Venice Art Biennale.

In 2005, she also began a ten-year collaboration with different organisations, Creative New Zealand (New Zealand Pavilion), the Australian Art Council (Australian Pavilion) and many other independent institutions at the Venice Biennale of Art and Architecture, where, working on the creative strategy and production of the site specific installations, she came into contact with artists such as Et Al, Bill Culbert, Simon Denny, Fiona Hall, etc

For the past 15 years, Silvia has lived in UK, Glasgow & London, where she has gained experience collaborating with Cultural Institutions, such as Royal Academy, V&A, Somerset House in London, The Lighthouse in Glasgow, etc, private Artists and Architects and with universities for the realisation of seminars and conferences related to the narrative environment, between art, architecture and technology.

In 2018, she founded the “Krafta Art Making Film Festival” in Glasgow, an international festival of independent documentaries focused on the “exploration of the creative process.”

Her most recent project was the 2024 exhibition of Federica Marangoni at the Murano Glass Museum, for which she coordinated the installation and the book, published by Electa.