Valentino Vannini (b. 1976, Florence, Italy) is a London-based multidisciplinary artist.
Through sculpture, drawing and print, Vannini’s practice invites viewers to encounter plasticity within a sensual landscape of forms. Materiality becomes a way to challenge authority and probe confinement, fragility and collapse, generating tensions between interior and exterior boundaries in his work.
He works with a raw palette of reinforced concrete, petroleum jelly, wax, resin, bitumen, fibres, and glass, often sourced from overlooked margins. These materials embody tensions: viscous and dry, rigid and soft, enduring and fragile. Cast, woven, or plaited, they echo and parody architectural language—skeletal frameworks, fencing, scaffolding, columns in search of moments where structure resists its own certainty.
Vannini also turns to marginal wastelands and vacant plots that slip beneath the social landscape. In particular, he draws on the spatial logic of gay cruising to understand the dynamics of such places. Here, queerness becomes a method of defiance, a way of reimagining systems, materials, and spatial codes. Following the entanglement of a blade of grass or the precarious loop of a found rubber band, the work translates the sensual charge of human encounters within these landscapes. Like sudden arousal or the prickle of goosebumps, anticipation and desire are carried through sculptural processes into abstract form, not as fixed objects, but as sites of transformation and resistance.
Vannini holds an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School (2023), where he recently completed a two-year fellowship in Glass and Cast, and is a graduate of Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna (BA Art, Drama and Music Studies).
He is one of the winners of NEW CONTEMPORARIES 2024 and he received the Sculpture Award from Studio West, London (2023). Recent exhibitions include: (2026) Mai Così Vicini – Never So Close (solo) Tuscany curated by Alberto Ancilotti; Almost Held with Damaris Athene, Stavanger; To Lure, To Hunt, To Catch curated by Sophie Nowakowska; Terence Higgins Trust 2026 Auction, Christie's, London. (2025-2024) NEW CONTEMPORARIES (ICA, London, 2025 - KARST, Plymouth 2024), Penetrable Boundaries (solo), Standpoint Gallery; The Lamb of Tartary, London, The Hide, Stroud; Acting Out, Ex Voto Gallery; Terence Higgins Trust 2025 Auction, Christie's, London; The Phoenix Garden; Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk, Meeting Point Projects; Dawn is now once again, Greenfield Project Space; an eXhibition of SMALL things with BIG ideas, White Conduit Projects; Unknown Territory, SET Lewisham; and Surprise, Somers Gallery (2023).
