Maurizio Anzeri (born 8 April 1969, in Loano, Italy) 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.
Education
From 1996 to 1999 Anzeri attended The London Institute, Camberwell College of Arts and studied a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sculpture and Graphic Design. Anzeri went on to do a master's degree in Fine Art Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 2002- 2005...
Career
As a sculptor, Anzeri uses synthetic hair to create slightly ominous, sentinel-like works. Piled into totemic forms, the bundled locks are simultaneously woven into curls, plaits and pleats. He produced sculptures with Alexander McQueen in 2000 and went on to work for a year with Isabella Blow creating "wearable" sculptures before doing a master's degree in Fine Art Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. Since graduating in 2005, Anzeri has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions across the world and his work is held in several public and private art collections.
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, and because of his family history, he saw his attraction to working with thread as verging on the inevitable. Fusing his earlier work with hair sculpture and his passion for old photographs, embroidery became a deliberately expressive tool for his work Anzeri’s elaborate needle-work set against somber backgrounds results in a sharp juxtaposition; and despite the history of both the technique and the images used, he produces work which treads new ground He conceived the term photo-sculpture to define his embroidery work with photographs
Anzeri exhibited at The Saatchi Gallery in the exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now in 2009, an exhibition that received significant coverage and media attention. Anzeri was one of Saatchi's 50 new artists who were being touted as the ‘new YBA’s’ The exhibition was cited as an explosion of new and vigorous forms which demonstrate the strength of contemporary art in Britain.
Anzeri won the 2010 Vauxhall Collective bursary prize for Fine Art and the resulting solo exhibition ‘The Garden Party’ at the Q Forum, London included sculptures made from long ropes of synthetic human hair.
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
As part of The King and I exhibition in Shanghai, China, Anzeri had his first public commission of a sculpture, Profiles for the Shanghai Gallery of Art in 2017.
Anzeri collaborated with the Italian music collective, C’mon Tigre on a music video Mono No Aware in a video directed by Marco Molinelli and was nominated for the Los Angeles Film Award for best music video in 2019. The film was also screened at the Bologna Film Festival Il Cinema Retrovato
Anzeri’s art works are held in public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum London that has five of Anzeri’s works in the permanent collection and the hair sculpture coat that Anzeri made for Alexander McQueen Lady Ugolino in the Alexander McQueen collection; the Saatchi Collection, London has eighteen of Anzeri's works [; the Fondazione Agnelli, Torino Italy; Shanghai Gallery of Art, China; Gagosian Collection; Rothschild Collection; Ivor Braka Collection, London; Statoil Collection, Oslo Norway; Missoni Collection, Milan Italy; The Museum Of Everything, London; Museo Cantonale, Lugano Switzerland; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany; Pier24 Photography, San Francisco USA