Monica Maja Richardson is an Italian abstract painter based in London, where she has lived and worked for over twenty years. After a successful career in television in Italy, she developed her practice as a painter through sustained experimentation in the studio, building a body of work that spans large-scale canvas painting across multiple series from 2011 to the present. Her paintings are grounded in colour, gesture, and rhythm. Working with bold, expansive compositions, she explores themes of emotion, memory, transformation, and the sensory experience of being alive. The work sits within the lineage of Abstract Expressionism — referencing artists such as Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler — while engaging equally with the conceptual and painterly rigour of Gerhard Richter's broader practice. The result is a visual language that is distinctly her own: layered, luminous, and physically immediate. Richardson's practice has been shaped by consistent public engagement: solo exhibitions, open studios, art fairs, and artist residencies across London, Nottingham, Venice, Berlin, and Rome. Her works are held in private collections in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, the United States, and Italy.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Painting found me before I fully understood what I was looking for. After years working in television, I needed something that was entirely my own — a language that didn't belong to a script or a camera or anyone else's vision. Colour had always been the way I experienced the world most intensely; painting made that visible for the first time. I work instinctively. I don't plan a composition — I follow the painting, and it takes me somewhere I couldn't have reached by thinking alone. The canvas becomes a conversation between what I feel and what emerges. Sometimes the work surprises me. That surprise is what I live for. My Italian roots, my twenty-something years in London, the beauty I find in movement, in music, in human connection — all of it feeds into the work without being stated. Abstract painting allows me to hold all of these things at once without having to resolve them. Emotion doesn't always have a name. Colour does. What I want most is for someone to stand in front of one of my paintings and feel something shift — a moment of joy, of energy, of aliveness. If the work gives someone that, even briefly, it has done what I set out to do.