Moved Souls • Riccardo Matlakas
Painting • Canvas • 78.7” x 78.7″$22,900 USD
Painting, Acrylic on Canvas.
Beautifully vibrant and meaningful, narrative pop art.
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Contemporary Hieroglyphs – And The Soul Of The Collective • Riccardo Matlakas
Painting • Canvas • 78.7” x 78.7″$17,400 USD
Painting, Acrylic on Canvas.
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Riccardo Matlakas
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Riccardo Matlakas is an Italian-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work moves fluidly across performance, sculpture, painting, installation, street intervention, and ceramic mosaic. He works from a single, uncompromising premise: the cultural and political conditions of a place are not context for the work. They are its raw material. He was born in Naples and raised in Scampia, a district known far beyond Italy for organised crime and hardship. There, inside the city’s hip-hop scene, his artistic instincts first found form: graffiti, poetry, and breakdance, learned not as separate pursuits but as one continuous language, later carried whole into fine art. His formal training began in Sculpture and Design at the University of Fine Arts in Naples, where he graduated in 2006, before a period moving between Berlin and London. In London he completed a PGCE in Art and Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, then a Diploma in Facilitating Learning in Arts for the Communities at the University of the Arts London, before turning to an MA in Social Sculpture and Contemporary Art at Oxford Brookes University, completed in 2014 and built on Joseph Beuys’s belief that art can act directly on society and politics, not merely comment on them. The artist has also completed an MRes in Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Since 2004 he has trained internationally in Butoh, situating his work in a lineage that descends from Ko Murobushi to Yoshito Ohno, and was invited to research at the Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno Archive in Tokyo, one of the tradition’s most important repositories. His training in movement extends further still, into Ethiopian martial art and dance (Dankira Tehwagi), contact improvisation, and physical theatre. Nothing he makes escapes this discipline. Even his murals, mosaics, and installations, static as they appear, carry a choreography inside them. This is the engine of his method: he reads the specific cultural, political, and environmental conditions of a place as a form of knowledge, and from that reading builds what he calls cathartic actions, works that confront political, environmental, and spiritual urgency at once. That search has taken him to the Archdiocese of Gwangju, South Korea, where he created a permanent sculpture; to Yerevan, where he spent a month making anti-war murals alongside Armenian and Ukrainian artists in the garden of the Institute of Contemporary Art of Yerevan (ICA); to Gozo, Malta, for a large public mosaic realised through Art4Sea with the European Union and the Goethe-Institut; and to Cape Town, for a monumental mosaic built over twenty unbroken days. His work has been shown at the Gwangju Biennale, the Moscow Biennale of Young Artists, the Prague Quadrennial, and Frieze Art Fair in London, and lives permanently in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art of Yerevan, the Museum of Palestine, Cape Town, and the Museum of Modern Art in Odesa, which holds and displays a relic from his performance Pyjama Party, made in Kharkiv, Ukraine, before the war. He has held solo exhibitions from Naples to Berlin, Sofia to Ibiza, and across South Korea and Vietnam. His residencies have taken him from the Municipal Gallery in Kharkiv, supported by the British Council and the Liverpool Biennale, to the Odesa Museum of Art under British Council sponsorship, to Mothership NYC in Brooklyn. Among these, his residency at Darat Al Funun in Amman stands out. He took part in Truth is Black, Write Over It With a Mirage’s Light, the third and final chapter of the foundation’s 30th-anniversary celebrations, drawn from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. Darat Al Funun’s own managing director named him, in The Jordan Times, among the internationally recognised artists in the show, a distinction that places him inside Jordan’s critical conversation rather than treating him as a visiting curiosity. In 2025 he was invited by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture and the Seoul Metropolitan Government to present his work at the Seoul Street Art Festival, one of South Korea’s major state-supported cultural platforms, and he has been invited to speak at institutions including the Busan Museum of Art, Chonnam National University, and the NCCA in St Petersburg. His public commissions carry that same instinct for context into unlikely places. A large-scale mural for Netflix’s London offices and a commissioned mural for Photoshop set his work inside the visual language of the platforms that now shape culture at scale, while a mural for the town of Aielli, Italy, commissioned directly by its mayor, roots the same practice in a small hill town choosing to make contemporary art part of its own identity. His book Vite In Quarantena, published in English as Quarantined Lives (Edizioni Kimerik, 2021, with psychologist Giuliana Attanasio), gathered ORLAN, Stelarc, and Sadhguru around a single question: what art and mind have to say to each other in a moment of global confinement. It is, in miniature, the same question that drives everything else he makes. Whether the material is ceramic, paint, a body in motion, or a wall in Naples, Seoul, or Kharkiv, Matlakas returns again and again to the same search: for the human thing that persists once place, politics, and circumstance have done their worst.