SERGIO BRAMBILLASCA / BIOGRAPHY
Sergio Brambillasca — Biography and Artistic Career
Sergio Brambillasca (born in Vimercate, Italy, in 1963) is an Italian contemporary artist working across painting, drawing, digital graphics and installation. His practice explores memory, identity, violence, and individual and collective responsibility.
After earning a diploma in surveying, he attended the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, developing an interest in space, proportion and compositional structures that would later find expression in his artistic research.
Throughout his career, he has created exhibitions and artistic projects in collaboration with public institutions, cultural organisations, schools and associations, developing an approach in which people’s participation plays a central role.
Art as Civic Testimony
Among his most significant projects is Sui passi della violenza (In the Footsteps of Violence), a cycle of fourteen works conceived as a secular Way of the Cross, in which human suffering becomes an opportunity to reflect on violence and society’s responsibilities.
The project has been presented in institutional and cultural venues, including the Regional Council of Lombardy, the Italian Senate, Pavia, Ferrara, Genoa and various municipalities.
A permanent artwork by Sergio Brambillasca has contributed to transforming Courtroom 2 of the Palace of Justice in Milan into the Aula della Memoria (Hall of Memory), dedicated to remembering the tragedy of 9 April 2015. The work helps preserve the memory of the victims and the civic significance of this place.
His commitment to combating violence has also been recognised with the Premio Mede@, documented further down this page.
Mediterraneo: Images and Poetry Against Forgetting
Mediterraneo – 2° Olocausto (Mediterranean — Second Holocaust) is a project developed with art critic and writer Paolo Levi. Through the dialogue between visual images and poetry, it addresses the tragedies of migration across the Mediterranean and questions our collective memory.
The collaboration was presented in an exhibition at the Galleria d’arte Acerbi in Cremona in December 2018, as part of a broader artistic journey that has reached other Italian cultural venues.
Figurative Research and Works Dedicated to Memory
Alongside his socially engaged projects, Brambillasca has pursued a pictorial exploration of the sea, landscape and the human figure. Exhibitions in Porto Viro, Cremona, Bellagio and Sanremo mark different stages of a journey in which figurative representation increasingly enters into dialogue with symbolic and conceptual expression.
In his Indimenticabili (Unforgettable Figures) portrait series, familiar faces from the collective imagination are reinterpreted through his personal visual language. In Marilyn, the painted image moves beyond the canvas through architectural projections and its translation onto a watch dial, creating a dialogue between painting, space and time.
Artistic Language: The Profile, the Perimeter and Participation
Brambillasca’s research is characterised by recurring visual elements: the human profile, an essential sign of presence, and the rectangular perimeter, a symbolic space or ‘invisible theatre’ in which the ‘inner rooms’ of memory, experience and thought take shape.
These elements extend into installations and participatory projects. People do not merely contribute to a finished artwork: their presence, words and gestures can help determine its very emergence and form. Brambillasca describes this as inverse genesis, a process in which reality enters the work before the work is returned to the community.
“Reality enters the artwork. Art returns it as a question.” — Sergio Brambillasca
An Evolving Artistic Journey
His research continues through new projects bringing together painting, memory, participation and civic responsibility. The artwork is not conceived merely as an object to be viewed, but as a space for relationships in which individual experience may become collective awareness.
“Memory is the school of an unwritten future.” — Sergio Brambillasca
Explore further: Historical Archive of Artistic Research.
RECOGNITION / 2022
Premio Mede@
In 2022, Sergio Brambillasca received the Premio Mede@ in recognition of his commitment to combating violence. The award acknowledges an aspect of his practice that goes beyond representation and seeks a direct dialogue with society and with people.
The inscription on the plaque reads: “For your continued efforts in the fight against gender-based violence and violence in general.” (Translation from the original Italian.)
The award forms part of Brambillasca’s civic and artistic journey, which includes Sui passi della violenza (In the Footsteps of Violence), an exhibition project comprising fourteen works and conceived as an opportunity to reflect on violence and personal responsibility.
The plaque reproduced here documents that recognition. Within the account of an artistic journey, its significance lies above all in the connection between the artist’s work and the commitment that accompanies it.