illustrator, comic author & musician
born 1966, Italy

Stefano Ricci resembles an explorer when he works on his sketches with a wide variety of materials such as oil pastels, adhesive tape and pencils, tracing paper and spray paint cans to form contours and plays of light or to emphasize blurriness. His works focus on topics such as everyday fears, the relationship between the individual and the environment or the search for identity. The stories are often fragmented, which leaves the recipient a lot of room for interpretation.

Since the mid-1980s, Stefano Ricci’s work has been published in international journals and magazines. His work focuses on comics and animated films, but he also works on theatre, dance and film productions. Since 1995, he has been managing the publishing house Edizioni Grafiche Squadro together with Giovanna Anceschi, which specializes in avant-garde comics and illustrations. Ricci has received several awards for his design and illustration projects and is co-founder of Sigaretten Edizioni. He teaches at the Università degli Studi di Udine, at the University of Applied Arts Hamburg and at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna.

„We have to leave the highways and venture onto country roads and forest paths if we want to experience unexpected perspectives.“