Ornella Gallo Di Fortuna

Area: Battersea

Type: Artist / Individual

Art form: Art, Craft, Design, Digital, Drawing, Illustration, Installation, Painting, Sculpture, Textiles

Castles in the Air
Castles in the Air
Tufting Us
Tufting Us

Biography / Artist statement

Ornella Gallo Di Fortuna (born 1982) is an Italo-Uruguayan artist and designer currently working internationally.

Having made art throughout early childhood and achieved recognition in the field over the following two decades. During those years, Ornella maintained her connection to art through a number of collaborations and exhibitions.

The art and design studio works across all scales and pursues a material practice that blends art, design, architecture and fashion.

With material and color as a departure point, the works explore the tensions between figuration and abstraction along with investigating space, volume, and texture beyond the limitations of the human body through sculpture garments, reliefs, assemblage, paintings, and collages.

During the processes of creation, she explores different paint mediums, materials, and ways of manipulation of any element (pigments, mosaics, metals, fabrics, yarns, organic fibers), transforming those elements in sculptures or artworks to make them look like other materials and construct new processes for the application of paints. There is a collaboration between her own desires and those of the materials. She considers painting and drawing to be an essential part of her creative process.
Relentlessly curious about and inspired by the diversity and complexity of all matter, Ornella strives to understand how to produce new material systems through technological and material innovation without leaving traditional techniques behind. Central to this process of investigation is the interest in craft in both physical and digital mediums. Craftsmanship occurs at the intersection between material knowledge and tool expertise.

Over the past 25 years, she has been designing and creating projects for the interior, public, and yacht industry.

The current exploration and art commissions both public and private are focus on the design and management of projects of large murals exploring the possibilities of Murano glass, fresco, and fabrics embroidered into walls or steel that resembles fabric textures, large etching glass, metal, and concrete embroidery.

Why do you love Wandsworth?

Battersea Park and having coffee in front of the Barbara Hepworth sculpture