Leonardo Devito

Leonardo Devito (b. 1997, Florence, Italy) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Turin. Working primarily across painting and sculpture, his practice combines autobiographical experience with references to literature, religion, mythology, and art history to construct intimate, enigmatic narratives. Drawing particularly from medieval and Renaissance visual culture, Devito explores painting’s capacity to tell stories while leaving their meaning open to interpretation.

His works often begin with images, memories, objects, or atmospheres to which he feels a personal connection. From these fragments, Devito develops scenes populated by recurring characters, animals, landscapes, and symbolic details, where everyday experience merges with allegory and fantasy. Childhood, desire, nostalgia, death, and memory recur throughout his practice, alongside an interest in the relationship between images and absence. Rather than constructing fixed narratives, he approaches each work as an inconclusive story, allowing viewers to project their own memories and associations onto the image.

Devito’s visual language draws on sources ranging from fifteenth-century Italian frescoes and sculptural groups to the writings of Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, and Dino Buzzati, as well as the imaginary worlds of Henry Darger. Historical compositions are frequently displaced into contemporary settings, creating images that feel simultaneously familiar and outside of time.

Devito studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna before completing his MFA at the Accademia Albertina in Turin in 2023. Recent solo presentations include Teatrino at Ciaccia Levi, Paris (2024), Candide, with Domenico Gnoli, at Drawing Week Milan (2024), and a solo presentation with Ciaccia Levi at LISTE Art Fair Basel (2025). His work has also been included in group exhibitions including Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley at Alison Jacques, London (2025), and X Collection 202: Portrait of a Man at X Museum, Beijing (2024).