Agnese Guido
The Flag of Plastic Man
2019
H 79.3 x W 66.5cm x D 4.4cm (Framed)
Oil on wood
Guido’s paintings are storytellers. From a young age, she has drawn inspiration from manga, comics, and medieval art. While trained in the intricate techniques of classical painting, she finds the graphic directness of comics and the imaginative freedom of outsider art more raw and immediate. Her work is anchored in the contemporary world, revealing the realities of modern life through playfulness, irony, and dark humour.
She brings ordinary objects to life by giving them faces, arms, and legs. “By humanising an object, it belongs to two worlds—this makes the image more poetic, more fun, and lets me say exactly what I mean,” Guido explains. In works such as The Flag of the Plastic Man (2019), recurring motifs like smoking factories, fast cars, and obsolete appliances evoke “anxiety, loneliness, and hallucinations—projections of contemporary life.” Human figures seldom appear as literal subjects; instead, they are implied through what they symbolise, rather than what they are.
About Agnese Guido
Born in Southern Italy in 1982, Agnese Guido trained at Milan’s Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where she continues to live and work. Though she favours tempera and gouache, her practice spans oil painting, ceramics, and papier-mâché. Since 2008, she has exhibited regularly across Italy, including in Milan, Rome, Parma, Battaglia, Benevento, and Turin.