Luigi Serafini (Rome, 1949) is an artist, architect, author and designer whose research has always developed outside the more conventional art contexts.

Una casa ontologica is conceived as an expanded work, a space in which Serafini has created a meta-portrait that transports his imaginative attitude into the museum through the reworking of the interiors of his Roman house. Made like an enormous three-dimensional Codex Seraphinianus and suspended between an oneiric set design in an undecipherable language and a work of geometric, cataloguing architecture, the artist’s home bears witness to almost 40 years of life and work, evidence that now runs the risk of vanishing due to eviction.  

The Codex is his best-known editorial work, containing over 1000 drawings made from 1976 to 1978 and published in 1981 by Franco Maria Ricci Editore: a visual encyclopaedia where every object or image reproduces or imagines an item of zoological, mechanical, botanical, mineralogical, technological and alien knowledge, in constant metamorphosis.  

The exhibition brings together a selection of Serafini’s eclectic output, ranging from sculpture to the design of everyday objects, freehand drawing to photography, publications to the invention of languages. 

LUIGI SERAFINI (Rome, 4 August 1949) is an Italian artist, architect, author and designer. He attended the Faculty of Architecture where he worked with Maurizio Sacripanti and Luigi Pellegrin. From 1971 to 1973 he travels between Iraq, Equatorial Africa, Congo and the United States where he works with architect Paolo Soleri on the rising experimental city of Arcosanti in Arizona. In 1981 he published the first edition of Codex Seraphinianus with Franco Maria Ricci Editore and in 1984 Pulcinellopedia (piccola) for the Longanesi publishing house. In the design field, Serafini collaborated in 1981 with Ettore Sottsass’ Memphis collective and then created projects such as Suspiral and Santa chairs for Sawaya & Moroni or glassware and lamps for Artemide. In 1990 he created the first poster for Federico Fellini’s film La voce della Luna. His works have been exhibited at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan, the XIII Quadriennale, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan and the Futurarium in Chicago. He has published short stories with Fandango, Bompiani, Archinto, as well as articles in numerous Italian newspapers and collaborated with Rai Radio 3 programs. Italo Calvino, Giorgio Manganelli, Federico Zeri, Achille Bonito Oliva, Douglas Hofstadter, Umberto Eco and Tim Burton, among others, have written about his work.