Profile: Enrica Masi

Enrica Masi has spent much of her creative life working with images.

Her career has moved through branding, visual communication, digital design, art direction and painting, with each discipline feeding into the next. Across all of it, there is a clear attraction to colour, shape and the emotional weight an image can carry.

Known simply as Masi, the Italian artist and multidisciplinary designer was born in 1987 and has worked internationally for more than a decade. Her practice has taken many forms, from visual identities and digital projects to paintings, publications and creative collaborations. Painting eventually became a central part of that world, giving her another way to work through ideas that did not need to follow the practical demands of a client, campaign or brief.

Her paintings are home to the Monsters.

These large abstract figures have become a recognisable part of Masi's work. Built from bold shapes and vibrant colours, they carry their own personalities without ever becoming literal characters. Some feel playful, others more introspective. Their forms leave space for imagination, allowing each person looking at them to bring their own thoughts and experiences into the work.

The visual language behind the Monsters is closely connected to memory. Masi draws inspiration from the Mediterranean, particularly the colours and landscapes that have stayed with her over time. Deep blue water, open skies, bougainvillea, sand and the intensity of southern light all find their way into her paintings.

The result feels like a collection of remembered places rather than a direct representation of them. Colour holds atmosphere. Shapes suggest movement and emotion. A painting can carry the feeling of a landscape without needing to show the landscape itself.

Masi's work moves through ideas of identity, belonging and imagination, along with the many contradictions people carry within themselves. Her background in design is present in the compositions, where shapes and colours are carefully arranged across the surface. At the same time, there is a sense of freedom in the paintings that allows instinct and play to remain visible.

That balance runs throughout her wider practice.

Masi has worked across a range of creative projects, bringing her visual language into different spaces and formats. Her portfolio includes collaborations with brands and artists, editorial work, publications, prints, typography and art direction. She has collaborated with Topologie and Collagerie, while her work has also appeared in galleries and museums, including the Hermitage Amsterdam. One of the pleasures of looking through Masi's body of work is seeing how ideas travel. A drawing can live on paper, while a visual concept can move into a physical space or become part of a collaborative project. The materials and formats change, but the thread connecting them remains recognisable.

Her work with photographer Tom Bird on El Quetzal brought photography and drawing together in a project inspired by Guatemala. In another project, her Monsters were translated into silkscreen prints for Hotel Unplugged in Rotterdam. These projects sit alongside her paintings while opening her practice to new contexts and audiences.

There is a natural curiosity running through all of it. Masi's work seems interested in what can happen when one idea is allowed to move beyond its original form.

Living and working between Italy and the Netherlands has also given her practice a sense of movement. Home is present in her work, though not always as a fixed geographical place. It appears through remembered colour, familiar landscapes and the emotional connection we build with the places that shape us. The Monsters seem to carry some of that feeling too. They are strange and familiar at the same time, made up of forms that remain open enough to become something different depending on who is looking.

Masi has built a visual world where design, painting and imagination exist alongside one another. Her work carries the discipline of someone who understands composition and communication, alongside the curiosity of an artist willing to follow an image wherever it leads.

Across paintings, collaborations and design projects, colour remains one of her strongest tools. It creates mood, holds memory and gives form to ideas that are often difficult to put into words.

For Enrica Masi, the image is never just one thing. It can be a painting, a memory, a character, a place or the beginning of an entirely different idea.