Born in 1981 in Avezzano, Italy, Ester Grossi is a multidisciplinary artist and works in various creative fields. This is no doubt also due to her wide-ranging education. After her High School diploma in Fashion, Design and Decoration at the art institute “Vincenzo Bellisario” in her hometown, she frequented the DAMS Bologna (Discipline delle Arti, della Musica e dello Spettacolo – Institute for Drama, Art and Music Studies). With her thesis “The Straight Story. Lynch e la pittura regionalista” she graduated with a bachelor in 2005. Subsequently, she made her master’s degree in Television, Cinema and Multimedia Production (University of Bologna) in 2008, followed by the Higher Education Diploma in Graphic Technique for Press and Printing, Salesian Institute of Bologna in 2009.
Besides her personal pictorial research, Ester created posters, magazines and album covers. Inter alia, she painted several images as basis for the annual promotional posters of the Teatro Lirico Sperimentale in Spoleto (Italy). This long-lasting cooperation with the theatre allowed her to discover the world of opera, at the time quite unknown to her. “Una notte, d’estate”, our Artwork of the Month /May 2026 was the advertisement for the season 2013.
With Sara Bonaventura, Ester conceived the visual background for the video of the album “Poseidon” by the Finnish musician Lau Nau in 2017 and designed the LP cover for 5 x 4 by the same artist in 2022. In the same year, she made the cover for the album “MORGON and KVELD” by the Norwegian performer Kristin Bolstad. In cooperation with other creatives, she designed clothing and accessories, an exhibition stand, many other promotional posters for film and music festivals.
In parallel, Ester is pursuing her artistic career as a painter with a special interest in popular culture, folklore, and mass communication. Always in a highly graphical technique, her earlier works show often stylised people (Written on the Hays, 2012); The Line below, 2012; Fucinus Lacus, 2013). These are increasingly disappearing from Ester’s pictorial spaces, giving way to fields of colour and lines (Token, 2014; Lumen 2015; Deep Down Inside the Colour, 2016). Prefaced by the series Red Hook Lines (2018), where she incorporated her impressions of the surroundings during her artist residency in Brooklyn, she began in 2020 her still ongoing series “Architecture”. Nonetheless, human beings didn’t totally vanish. Continuing since 2015, her “Personae” were in the beginning more abstract masks. A representative example is our Artwork of the month / September 2019 “Black Out 2” from 2018. Over time, the Personae began to take on a more human form again. However, they remain faceless and anonymous. Thus, the pictural work ranges between stylised figuration and analytical abstraction.
Most of Ester’s series were presented in solo shows, mostly in Italy. Moreover, her works joined numerous group exhibitions in Italy, but also in several European countries, the Ivory Coast and Cuba. Twice she was finalist for the Arteam Cup and the Premio Cairo Prize and honoured by the Italian Factory Prize in 2010. Currently, Ester’s paintings for the promotional posters of the Teatro Lirico Sperimentale are presented in the group exhibition “Lirico Sperimentale – Manifesti d’autore” in the Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto. The show in occasion of the 80th anniversary of the theatre’s activity is open until 2 June 2026. On view is a selection of original sketches and preparatory drawings, displayed alongside the posters subsequently produced.
Ester lives and works in Bologna.