About

Giulia Zaniol RE

Giulia Zaniol RE is an Italian artist based in London. A member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, her practice investigates material instability as both ontological condition and structural metaphor, working across encaustic painting, collagraph printmaking and sculpture.

She completed her Master’s degree in Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts and was awarded the Clifford Chance Postgraduate Student Award in 2006, selected by Allen Jones RA. Her work has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2018, and is held in the print collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Following a strategic hiatus, she is currently undertaking an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School, further consolidating her research-led practice centred on materiality, ecology and structural systems.

Practice & Research

Zaniol’s practice is rooted in her Venetian lineage. Coming from a family whose origins trace back to Venice across generations, the city informs her work not as distant subject but as inherited structure. Built upon submerged timber foundations and sustained through continuous negotiation with water, subsidence and erosion, Venice embodies a fragile equilibrium that underpins her enquiry into material instability.

Her research draws on contemporary materialist thinking, approaching matter as active rather than inert. Wax, fibre, timber and plate are treated as living processes whose behaviours — softening, cracking, fusing, resisting — shape meaning. Instability is not symbolic but structural: through layering, embedding and the exposure of support systems, her works reveal the hidden frameworks that permit continuity.

Encaustic’s translucency allows surfaces to hover between opacity and dissolution, while collagraph plates embed Venetian lace and damask textures, indexing cultural inheritance without nostalgia. In recent sculptural works, the vulnerable figure of her youngest child — often anchored by branches — functions as intimate architecture. The sculpture references Venice’s inverted forest: the submerged timber that sustains the city above water. Here, the fragile body becomes a micro-structure, foregrounding dependency as both familial and ecological condition.

Across media, Zaniol explores fragility not as weakness but as generative force — a site where resilience, care and interdependence are continually negotiated.