VALERIA VACCARO

Valeria Vaccaro (b. 1988, Italy) studied sculpture at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin. Since 2005, she has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions across Italy, Norway, France, Germany, England, and Montenegro, as well as at international contemporary art fairs. In 2022, she was awarded Second Prize at the VAF Foundation IX Edition, a distinction granted by the prestigious German foundation dedicated to promoting innovative positions in contemporary Italian art and fostering their visibility in Germany.

Vaccaro’s practice is structured around fundamental contrasts: heavy and light, eternal and ephemeral, precious and ordinary. Working primarily in marble, she challenges the historical weight and monumentality associated with the material, transforming it into a medium capable of expressing fragility, transience, and instability. Through virtuosic carving, she renders marble deceptively mutable — shaping it to resemble wood, paper, or charred surfaces marked by flame.

Fire occupies a central symbolic role in her work. Fascinated by its purifying, alchemical, and primordial significance, Vaccaro approaches fire not as destruction, but as transformation. It becomes a generative force — one that alters matter and redefines form. By sculpting marble to evoke burnt and blackened wood, she introduces a striking tension between permanence and impermanence, illusion and substance.

Across both three-dimensional sculptures and two-dimensional relief works, Vaccaro elevates ordinary objects into refined, almost metaphysical presences. The precision of execution underscores the conceptual core of her practice: marble, the sculptural material par excellence, becomes a metaphor for contemporary society — fluid, uncertain, and continuously reshaped by invisible forces.

Her work ultimately positions transformation not as rupture, but as an inherent and ongoing condition of existence.