Bea Bonafini
Artist Profile
Bea Bonafini is an Italian, London-based artist whose practice moves fluidly across painting, installation, textile, sculpture and print. Describing herself as a cultural anthropologist, Bonafini draws from disparate histories, mythologies and visual traditions, bringing together clashing temporalities and geographies into layered, hybrid compositions.
Her work often operates through fragmentation and reconstruction. Symbols migrate across surfaces; bodies, animals and ornamental motifs are recombined and recontextualised. Through this process, Bonafini interrogates ideas of identity, migration and inheritance — asking how cultural narratives are carried, translated and transformed.
Bonafini graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2016 and a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2014. Since graduating, she has exhibited extensively both in the UK and internationally, developing a practice recognised for its formal complexity and psychological charge.
Across mediums, Bonafini consistently tests and destabilises the materials she works with, treating each surface as a site of negotiation rather than resolution.
