Stefano Ricci

Stefano Ricci, born in 1966 in Bologna, lives and works as an artist and university lecturer in Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Italy. In the middle of the nineties, Ricci set up the comic magazine »Edition Mano« with Giovanna Anceschi and offered his services to the associated gallery.

Since 1985, Ricci has produced drawings, paintings, illustrations, dance performances and films; many of his works cross the conventional boundaries between the genres. Ricci uses very different materials for his pictures, ranging from oil pastel chalks, pencils, glue sticks and transparent paper right up to watercolours and spray paint. His free and yet narrative works, which are marked by multi-layered, relief-like surfaces have been published internationally as comics, and as posters for theatre and film. In addition, the artist has published numerous illustrations and comics in weekly magazines since the eighties. His first book publication was the 1994 volume »Dottori« (tr. Doctor). As comics he has published not only several short stories, but also the 1996 album »Tufo« (tr. Tufa), with texts from Philippe de Pierpont; it was also translated into German and French, and presented at the Angoulême comic festival in 1997 and nominated for the Prix International de la Bande Dessinée di Bruxelles. For the magazine »Glamour« Ricci worked together with Gabriella Giandelli to create the graphic series »anita«, which was published as a book in Italy, France, Spain and Germany from 1998. In a private diary, Giandelli and Ricci present the life of a young woman. »This poetic study of loneliness stands out in the otherwise very graphic comic landscape due to its almost pastose application of colour«, praised German newspaper, the »Tagesspiegel«. By gluing acetate panels onto cardboard, in order to achieve a plastic effect for his coloured surfaces, Ricci created »a comic made up of paintings«. And the »NZZ« wrote that Ricci had »fallen in love with the expressionistic style of German-language comics, even if this fantasies turn out sometimes to be even more reduced, even more fragmented and abstracter than those of his colleagues«. Ricci’s most recent graphic tale »Die Geschichte des Bären« (2014; tr. The story of the bear) is a fable about society based on the hunt for the bear Bruno who roamed freely along the Bavarian-Austrian border in 2006, which brings together the autobiographical with the fictitious and tells a tragic family story.

Stefano Ricci teaches at the Design, Media and Information faculty at the University of Applied Sciences. He is also a lecturer in comic art at the University of Udine in Italy and he runs the Mami publishing house with his wife, the artists Anke Feuchtenberger.

Dottori

Metrolibri

Bologna, 1994

Tufo

[Zus. mit Philippe de Pierpont]

Amok

Paris, 1996

anita

Freon

Brüssel, 1998

Avant

Berlin, 1998

Depositonero

Freon

Brüssel, 1999–2005

Die Geschichte des Bären

Avant

Berlin, 2014

www.mamiverlag.de