Valentina Grilli

Valentina Grilli is an Italian painter. Trained in set design, she quickly shifted her career towards creative practices, working for Loro Piana and Roberto Cavalli, and later as a textile designer for Patrizia Pepe. Alongside this, she developed her own painting practice, delving into traditional techniques such as oil painting and egg tempera. She currently teaches at Raffles Milano and regularly leads workshops at IULM and NABA in Milan.

His work is rooted in a careful observation of reality, driven by an analytical and intuitive vision, centered on everyday and fragmented experiences. He captures the traces of a perceptible human presence in passage and transit, within a suspended atmosphere where inhabited spaces are visited by his subjects, confronting universal and profound themes.

More recently, his research has turned to still life, exploring ordinary objects as bearers of everyday stories, repeated gestures and hidden poetry, inviting reflection on the value of small things and on existence.

In the Gateways series, half-open doors and passages without horizons place the viewer in a state of oscillation between the known and the unknown, between what is revealed and what remains hidden. The threshold, conceived as a limen both physical and metaphorical, becomes a space of tension, transformation, and potentiality, where the observer is invited to choose between advancing toward the mysterious or remaining anchored in the visible. The door symbolizes a separation that connects opposing dimensions—interior and exterior, concrete and immaterial, the unknown and consciousness—while the rarefied light creates a suspended and ambiguous atmosphere. In this transitional space, the boundary transforms into a meeting point between reality and perception, opening onto horizonless perspectives and an infinite field of possibilities.