Grazia Toderi (1963)

Biography

Grazia Toderi is an Italian artist working primarily in the medium of video art. Born in Padua, and trained in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna, Toderi began working in the medium of media and video art in the 1990s. Currently working out of Milan and Turin, the MIT Museum describes her as "one of the most recognized visual artists working in Italy today". Toderi is inspired in part by Giotto and other early 14th-century painters, but "draws more heavily on contemporary experience, from distant views of cities glowing at night to the zero-gravity ballets of the U.S. space programs". Latvia's NOASS has described Toderi as first gaining critical attention in 1993 after participating in the 45th Venice Biennale, and "often referred to as one of the most important contemporary artists, working in fields of video projection and installation art and is recognized for her iconic use of aerial images of nighttime metropolitan cities." Much of Toderi's video art involves visualizations of the infinite, and Toderi credits this to a "formative moment in her childhood—watching the simulcast of the first moonwalk."