Lanfranco Quadrio De Agostini

Lanfranco Quadrio De Agostini, born in Lecco, Italy, in 1966, is an artist who combines the disciplines of printmaking and drawing with a powerful pictorial vision rich in expressive force, testimony, and mythological resonance.

With exhibitions in London (Gallery Rosenfeld, 2013, 2014, and 2017), Paris (Galerie Michèle Broutta, Galerie Sellem, Galerie Sagot-Le Garrec), Imola (, Museo Civico di Imola, 2021), and Florence (, Galleria Il Bisonte, February 2025), Lanfranco Quadrio De Agostini has earned significant international recognition in the fields of printmaking and drawing. His achievements include the First Prize at the international competition "40 Years of Il Bisonte" at the Marino Marini Museum (Florence, 2000). Collaborations with renowned print workshops—including Il Bisonte (Florence, 2025), Atelier Moret (Paris, 2021), Atelier Tazé (Paris, 2024), and Atelier Bujarek (Prague, 2004)—further attest to the exceptional professional and technical quality of his practice.

Quadrio De Agostini began studying engraving at an early age under the guidance of his father, Guido Quadrio De Agostini. He later received formal training at the State Institute of Art and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo, complementing his education with specialized workshops in Urbino, Cagliari, Prague, and Paris.

His artistic practice is rooted in the mastery of burin engraving, etching, and highly refined draftsmanship. Animals—dogs, deer, insects—and human figures are rendered with extraordinary anatomical precision, reflecting the legacy of Renaissance and Mannerist traditions. Ancient myths, including those of Actaeon, Scylla, and Phaethon, become the foundation for a deeply contemporary visual language.

In exhibitions such as The Agony of Actaeon (London, 2013) and The Politics of the Void (London, 2017), the artist employs a distinctly Dantean vision as a lens through which to examine today's social and political crises, including migration, violence, and the fragility of the human condition. Myth is relocated into contemporary contexts, not as allegory or illustration, but as an evocative language of universal responsibility. Actaeon's transformation, Scylla's chaos, and Phaethon's fall become metaphors for an existence shaped by fate, vulnerability, and latent violence.

His works often combine layers of ink, graphite, watercolor, and oil, producing dreamlike yet intensely physical images that are simultaneously seductive and unsettling. Through anatomical superimpositions and continuous metamorphoses—such as dogs transforming into horses—his compositions become archetypal reflections on transformation, suspended between life and death, humanity and fossilized memory. Tightly constructed spatial dynamics and the palpable tension of struggling or falling bodies evoke not only mythological narratives but also historical testimony.

Working from Sicily—a land marked by organized crime, migration, and collective memory—the artist does not depict social conflict directly. Instead, it remains an underlying presence that amplifies the emotional and symbolic power of his mythological imagery. Rather than adopting overt political rhetoric, Quadrio De Agostini favors emotional intensity and poetic suggestion.

A master of line and mark-making, Lanfranco Quadrio De Agostini creates works poised between dream and instinct, where classical mythology becomes a powerful means of reflecting on human vulnerability and the tragedies of modern history. His art is not spectacle, but remembrance—an intellectual and visual experience that continues to resonate profoundly with the contemporary world.