
Artist · Collection One · 2019
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.
Bea Bonafini’s 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.
Bea 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, Bea Bonafini consistently tests and destabilises the materials she works with, treating each surface as a site of negotiation rather than resolution.
Recently, Bea Bonafini’s work featured in Interweave at Gazelli Art House, London, from 17 July to 25 September 2026, a group exhibition exploring connections between textile traditions, contemporary image-making and technology. Earlier in the year, her solo exhibition Intangible at Vangar in Valencia ran from 22 May to 24 July 2026, bringing together works concerned with metamorphosis, birth and transformation.
“Bea brings together symbols and patterns from different cultural traditions, reworking them into layered compositions that explore identity, history and belonging.”