Ilaria Costaglia (b. 2001, Italy) lives near Padua and works in Mestre, Venice. She is currently completing the two-year postgraduate Painting programme at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Since 2025, she has participated in the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa residency programme. She has been a finalist for several awards, including Artefici del Nostro Tempo in 2025 and 2026 (Venice), the Combat Art Prize in 2025 (Livorno) and the Prisma Art Prize (Rome). She has exhibited in several group exhibitions, including Ensemble, Fondazione The Bank (Vicenza); Com’è andata oggi? Bene, Universo Factory (Treviso); and Chiamata alle arti, Italian Cultural Institute, Rome and New York.
Ilaria Costaglia's work employs a painterly language that extends beyond the boundaries of the surface, expanding into sculpture and installation. The different techniques she uses function as visual devices through which she enhances both the painting and its subject.
At the heart of her practice lies the concept of the feminine, understood as a symbolic territory in which desire, strength and grace coexist. Her female figures always inhabit lush, untamed natural landscapes that are nevertheless not hostile. Nature is neither a backdrop nor a dominant element, but a living presence with which her subjects interact through a relationship of reciprocity and belonging.
This natural world is constantly permeated by strawberries, flowers, pearls and rabbits. Traditionally associated with embellishment and decoration, these elements are removed from their purely aesthetic context and endowed with symbolic meaning. Ornament thus becomes a language and part of the narrative, capable of evoking memory, sensuality, care and transformation, reclaiming its place from the marginal position to which it has often been relegated throughout the history of painting.
Ilaria Costaglia's sculptural installations expand upon this reflection. Small papier-mâché structures resembling caskets or old tabernacles house intimately scaled paintings devoted to these ornamental details. Like contemporary relics, flowers, fruit and animals are preserved and adorned with pearls, inviting us to slow down and recognise their preciousness. Through these sculptures, the artist reminds us that the act of safeguarding something often coincides with preserving it in our memory.
The two paintings explore precisely this idea. Through a relationship of mutual protection between the female figure and the animal, Ilaria Costaglia develops a reflection on shared vulnerability.
In the first painting, a young woman lies upon a meadow while a dog watches over her. The animal assumes the role of guardian, evoking protection and loyalty. In the second work, this relationship is reversed. It is the young woman who protects the dog, cradled within a hollow in the ground that recalls a grave. Far from any tragic intent, the image transforms the act of burial into one of care and remembrance, suggesting the reciprocal affection shared by different species. The artist opens up a reflection on the emotional realm, in which safeguarding becomes a mutual bond founded upon trust and love.
Ilaria Costaglia offers a reinterpretation of the feminine through an aesthetic that is unafraid of ornament, employing it as an instrument of investigation and resistance. Her practice constructs a suspended imaginary in which the delicate and the wild, the intimate and the monumental, coexist without contradiction.
Text by Milena Zanetti