Chiara Silvano
Venice
Chiara Silvano is an Italian artist based in Venice whose work explores the subtle relationship between inner experience and lived reality. Her practice is rooted in painting and extends through the use of textiles, embroidery, and thread, which become integral elements of the pictorial surface. Silvano’s work arises from an urgent and instinctive need to give form to emotional states that exist in a suspended moment—on the threshold between what is happening and what is about to happen. Her paintings inhabit that fragile line where the ordinary can suddenly shift into the unexpected. Through this process, she investigates how inner
Chiara Silvano is an Italian artist based in Venice whose work explores the subtle relationship between inner experience and lived reality. Her practice is rooted in painting and extends through the use of textiles, embroidery, and thread, which become integral elements of the pictorial surface.
Silvano’s work arises from an urgent and instinctive need to give form to emotional states that exist in a suspended moment—on the threshold between what is happening and what is about to happen. Her paintings inhabit that fragile line where the ordinary can suddenly shift into the unexpected. Through this process, she investigates how inner worlds resonate with and are transformed by the external environment.
Women occupy a central role in her visual narratives. Often approached through an autobiographical lens, her figures appear as fragments of a visual diary—quick annotations, fleeting sensations, intimate reflections. In this sense, Silvano considers her painting a visionary practice of perception and feeling rather than representation.
In recent years, animals—particularly birds—have become recurring presences in her work. They function as symbolic figures, messengers of freedom, renewal, and reconnection with nature, suggesting the possibility of transformation and new beginnings.
Oil painting is her primary medium, chosen for its immediacy and emotional depth. She paints quickly, guided by intuition rather than technical perfection, seeking the intensity of the gesture and the truth of the moment. Embroidery is introduced later as a slower, meditative act—one that stabilizes, fixes, and deepens the initial impulse. Each stitch becomes both a physical mark and a symbolic gesture, connecting the work to an ancient, feminine knowledge and creating a tactile, three-dimensional surface.
Silvano’s practice is deeply informed by her multiple identities as artist, woman, mother, and daughter. These roles do not exist separately but continuously inform one another, shaping a body of work that moves between memory and vision, care and rupture, intimacy and resistance.
Her artistic influences include Paula Rego, Frida Kahlo, Marlene Dumas, and Alice Neel, as well as the poetic and imaginative language of contemporary children’s illustration.
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Chiara Silvano ARTWORKS
Chiara Silvano EXHIBITIONS
CHIARA SILVANO
Chiara Silvano is an Italian artist who lives in Venice.
She has exhibited mainly in Germany, in group shows that have included artists such as Baselitz, Grossman and TAL R. Solo shows have been held in Venice, Passau and in London.
Her interest is in the way art intertwines with lived life, to become the mark of our emotional states of being. She sees her own practice as a mirror reflecting inner insight, and in this sense, her paintings may be thought of as a kind of travel journal, registering subtle shifts of perception and the feelings they engender. Fabric and small pieces of embroidery are often added to the painted surface.
Venice, Italy
www.chiarasilvano.com
Instagram: @chiara.silvano
Education
2005 – 2007
MA in Design and Production of Visual Arts (Visual Arts, thesis on Art as Therapy)
IUAV – University Institute of Architecture of Venice, Italy
Jan – May 2007
École Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France
2000 – 2003
BA (Hons) Fine Art, Painting
Wimbledon School of Art, London, UK
1999 – 2000
BTEC Foundation in Art and Design
City of Westminster College, London, UK
Solo Exhibitions
2025
- Fedele a me stessa, Imagina Café, Venice, Italy
2023
- Dentro e fuori, Barchessa Villa Fapanni Combi, Martellago (VE), Italy
2022
- Festival delle Arti, Piante e Magia, Venice, Italy
2018
- Bistrot de Venise, Venice, Italy
2015
- Il peso della leggerezza / Das Gewicht der Leichtigkeit, Passau, Germany
2010
- La leggerezza dell’inquietudine, Venice, Italy
2008
- Io non sono un uomo, Aurora Art Caffè, Venice, Italy
2004
- White Nights, Foundry Gallery, London, UK
Group Exhibitions (Selected)
2025
- TIERE, Kunstprojekte Sigrun EM Leyerseder, Hauzenberg, Germany
- Connessioni Estetiche, promoted by the Municipality of Venice, Italy
- …wo der uppingen Natur entspriessen…, Hauzenberg, Germany
2024
- Serendipity, Kunstprojekte Sigrun CM Leyerseder, Hauzenberg, Germany
2023
- Kind of Blu, Kunstprojekte Sigrun CM Leyerseder, Hauzenberg, Germany
- Borderless, Beyond the Frame, Norwegian Cultural Institute, Singapore
- Interferences, M.A.D.S. Gallery, Milan, Italy
2022
- Hinschauen, Kunstprojekte Sigrun CM Leyerseder, Hauzenberg, Germany
2016
- New Cross Pavilion III, London, UK
- Malerei, Kunstprojekte Sigrun CM Leyerseder, Hauzenberg, Germany
2015
- 20 Jahre, Hauzenberg, Germany (with Baselitz, Grossmann, Lüpertz, Merz, Penck, TAL R)
2014
- Finalist, SATURA Prize, Genoa, Italy
- Finalist, Janua Prize, Italy
Performances
2006
- Fuori e dentro si soffoca, chi ha spento la luce?, Venice, Italy
(co-produced with artist Karin Finchi)
Collections & Collaborations
2025
- Collaboration with S. Giorgio Café, Venice: three works acquired and reproduced in restaurant menus
Chiara Silvano
San Giovanni Grisostomo
Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy
Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy
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