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Elio Ticca is a contemporary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Working through strategies of camouflage, reconstruction, and visual displacement, he investigates how the representation of affect can be conceptually and culturally deconstructed, as well as narrated in new plastic and visual forms.

His work is a multifaceted exploration of memory, emotion, and identity. By weaving together painting, sculpture, installation, and wall-based work, he builds a visual language that bridges the everyday and the uncanny, the historic and the speculative.

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At the heart of his practice lies a fascination with affect — how emotions are stored, transferred, and reinterpreted through objects and imagery. Whether he is rendering still lifes of banal domestic items, or forging ambiguous three-dimensional forms, he treats ordinary things as if they were relics of the self. Ticca’s work becomes a forensic archaeology of the personal: familiar yet estranged, intimate yet alienated.

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Ticca’s approach is deeply theatrical. He treats his studio and his materials like a stage: banality becomes performance, memory becomes set design, and objects become actors in small, symbolic dramas. Through this performative restructuring, he opens a space for dreamlike reflection, where dream and reality, desire and memory, merge. His work leans more towards the sphere of the irrational, rather than reality as we know it. This is a deliberate embrace of the oneiric — a domain in which the unconscious can surface, and where freedom, transformation, and multiplicity coexist.

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Broadly speaking, Ticca’s work challenges binaries: ancient / modern, real / imagined, public / private, masculine / feminine, rooted / displaced. His practice is speculative and post-surreal; it reconstructs and reinterprets inherited narratives. It invites the viewer into a space that is at once personal and collective — a place where longing, loss, and identity are negotiated through form, object, and memory.

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Ultimately, Ticca’s art is an invitation: to reflect on how we carry our histories (personal, social, cultural), how we perform our identities, and how the simplest object can become a portal into the unconscious.

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EDUCATION

2007-2011
IUAV University of Venice, Italy
BA Visual and Performing Arts

2013-2014


University of Leeds, School of Fine Arts, Histories of Art
and Cultural Studies, United Kingdom
MA History of Art

2018-2020


Art-T – School of Performing Arts, Brussels – Bruxelles
Professional course in Art Therapy

2022 – 2023
Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre, Brussels, Belgium
Agrégation – Teacher Training Certificate for Upper Secondary Education (visual arts)

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COLLECTIONS

Public collection of the municipality of Neoneli, Sardinia, Italy (2017)

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Interface HUB/ART, Milan and Barcelona (2017)

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PUBLICATIONS

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Interface HUB/ART: Elio Ticca & Mary della Giovanna.

Exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2017

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ONLINE FEATURES

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HLWM, Belgium: "Mannelijk naakt is nog altijd een taboe in de kunst - Male nudity is still a taboo in art" (NL) (2023)

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"Metaphysics in the Kitchen. A Conversation with Elio Ticca"

Interview with Salvo Costantino (2023)

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BRUZZ Belgium: video interview by José Huedo (EN, FR, NL) (2022)

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Take it Artsy, online podcast, by Sofia Paggioro, online on Spotify (IT) (2021)

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SELECTED EXHIBITION


2025

Le soleil ne fait pas de bruit

Curated by Arianna Guidi

Chapel of Grand Hospice, Brussels, Belgium

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Schmuck

Curated by Arianna Guidi and Manolis ten Haaf 

Basel, Switzerland​

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Lueurs – étoiles et poussières

Curated by Marcel Teton collective 

La part du feu gallery, Brussels, Belgium

 

Elio Ticca – Divinae

Fondazione per l'arte Bartoli Felter, Sardinia, Italy

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2024

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Hosting

Curated by Manon de Boer, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Juan Pablo Plazas, Richard Venlet and Tania Nasielski

Centrale of Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium

 

Saints & Sinners

Curated by Colm Mac Athlaoich

Chapel of Grand Hospice, Brussels, Belgium

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Elio Ticca – Le temps théorique

Curated by Anna Oggiano – exhibition text by Shoshana Walfish

Spazio E_EmmE, Cagliari, Italy​

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Elio Ticca – Vacanze Romane

Chapel of Grand Hospice, Brussels, Belgium

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2022

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Tales from the Inside Out: Lost in the Mirror

Curated by Marta Orsola Sironi

Group show – Co_atto, Porta Garibaldi train station, Milan, Italy

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Trauma Fauna

Curated by Nathan French
Group show – Shame Galllery, Brussels – Brussels, Belgium

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2021

Elio Ticca – Ringkomposition 

Curated by Thomas Gaye
La peau de l’ours gallery, Brussels, Belgium

 

2020

Elio Ticca – A room, a kitchen, dishes, light 
Ballon Rouge Collective, Brussels, Belgium

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2019

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Elio Ticca – Bloody Cheque
Curated by Anna Oggiano
Spazio E_EmmE, Cagliari, Italy

Fiber Art Biennale of Sardinia I
Curated by Baingio Cuccu and Anna Rita Punzo
Murats – Fiber Art Museum of Sardinia, Samugheo, Italy

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Elio Ticca – Finestre Veneziane – Venetian Windows 
Arte Laguna Prize – Business for Art award
Tessiture Bevilacqua, Venice

Elio Ticca – Zefiro Torna
VisionOttica Ticca, Ozieri, Italy

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2018

Elio Ticca – Collateral Solutions 
Casa Manconi, Nuoro, Italy

Le Donne, I Cavallier, L’Arme, Gli Amori
Curated by Anna Rita Punzo and Ivo Seraino Fenu 
Pinacoteca Comunale Carlo Contini, Oristano, Italy

2017

The Contended  Witness – Elio Ticca & Mary Della Giovanna
Curated by Giulia Blasig 

Interface HUB/ART,  Milan, Italy

Felure/Failure of the Matter
Curated by Giulia Blasig and Arthur Fogel

Tailleurs D’Images, Brussels, Belgium



2015
Maps
Curated by SCENE – Ian Law and Anna Hastings 

70 Paul Street, London, UK

2013
Congiunzioni Festival
Festival of visual and performing arts
Curated by Gianluca Asmundo and Maria Grazia Galatà,  Venice

2012
Zoom Zoom Fest, Festival of visual and performing arts 

Curated by Serena Luce
Padua, Italy