Quayola

Biography

Davide Quayola is an Italian-born, UK-based visual artist and filmmaker whose work investigates the tension between the real and the artificial, and between classical and contemporary image-making. Working across video, robotic sculpture, and large-scale installation, Quayola frequently draws on canonical works of art history, reinterpreting them through algorithmic and digital processes. His long-running Captives series takes its name and inspiration from Michelangelo's unfinished marble sculptures, using robotic carving to produce forms that appear to be caught mid-transformation between raw block and finished figure, echoing the master's technique of 'non finito.' In other bodies of work, Quayola has developed a series of algorithmically generated landscape paintings, sometimes exhibited as moving, evolving digital canvases that reference the tradition of plein-air painting while being generated and rendered in real time by custom software. His practice consistently returns to the collision between old and new, treating classical sculpture, painting, and landscape as raw material to be filtered through contemporary computational tools. Quayola's immersive installations have been presented at major museums, festivals, and public art commissions internationally, and his work is often discussed alongside that of other artists working at the intersection of new media and art history. Through pieces that are at once painstakingly crafted and algorithmically generated, Quayola continues to probe what happens when centuries-old artistic traditions are re-imagined using robotics, sensors, and generative code.