Francesca Tulli

The first complete monograph on the Italian artist and her original and visionary realism

This book is the first indepth publication devoted to the work of Francesca Tulli (1956-2024).

Francesca Tulli's paintings and sculptures have developed as parallel practices, linked by her personal interpretation of a complex and perceptive realism, balanced between the naturalistic and the surreal. Her paintings, in black-and-white or in bold colour, often depict lush domestic interiors which are seemingly comfortable, yet due to their tilted perspectives and unusual viewpoints, become strangely unsettling. Her final canvases show patterned rugs which appear to be moved by subterranean forces or mysteriously sucked into vortexes.

In her sculptures, the artist's sinuous figures are posed in dynamic equilibrium, sometimes existing as athletes or "mutated" creatures. Made from bronze, terracotta or plaster, her figures shift between classical and futuristic, integrated with different materials including rusty steel, photographs, sand, glass spheres and led-lights.

Tulli's figures are beings which are simultaneously familiar and other-worldly.