Biography
Yuri Catania (Milan, 1975) is an Italian-Swiss visual artist. He lives and works in Rovio, Val Mara, in the Swiss canton of Ticino. He makes ephemeral, participatory urban installations, as well as painting and sculpture: the works begin with digital tools and are completed by hand, and are made to deteriorate and disappear. He has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Centro Culturale Candiani in Venice and the Erarta Museum in St Petersburg.
Yuri Catania was born in Milan in 1975. In 2013 the curator René-Julien Praz invited him to take part in the group exhibition Art Is Hope at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; a second appearance in Art Is Hope followed in 2016 at Galerie Perrotin. Around the same time he settled in Rovio, in the municipality of Val Mara, Ticino, where he lives and works.
From 2018 his photography left the exhibition space and began to be applied directly to urban and architectural surfaces. The installations use the paste-up technique and are collective works: residents, school groups and volunteers cut and paste alongside the artist. They are made to deteriorate and disappear, and the surface returns to its previous condition — the work occupies a shared space for a defined time, then gives it back. Some installations carry a layer of augmented reality that places a second image alongside the physical one.
The process follows a constant axis across every technique: digital origin, analogue conclusion. The digital generates, the hand completes. This holds for the figures cut and pasted in participatory performance, for painting, and for sculpture, modelled digitally, 3D-printed as a preparatory form and completed in bronze by lost-wax casting.
Public works in Ticino include I Gatti di Rovio (2021–2022), an open-air exhibition spread through the old centre of Rovio and the municipalities of Arogno, Maroggia and Melano; Lvgaxy Astro Flowers (2023), an installation on the façade of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Lugano dedicated to the astronaut Claude Nicollier; Jazz off the Wall — New Orleans Journey (2024), made for the fortieth edition of JazzAscona with the Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Ascona; Astro Credy, on the Credinvest Bank building in Lugano, in two successive versions (2025 and 2026); and Universo (2025), made with the community of the Università della Svizzera italiana. In Milan, in 2023, he made IMperfect, a 120-metre work promoted by the IEO-Monzino Foundation.
He has exhibited at the Centro Culturale Candiani in Venice (2018) and at the Erarta Museum in St Petersburg, where in 2023 he presented the solo exhibition Moonlit Garden with fifty works from the series Black Flowers Secret Garden.
In 2026 the Casa comunale of Val Mara hosted the exhibition Yuri in Wonderland and the participatory work Moon Flowers Generoso Mission on the building’s façade. In the same year he made Neo Eva 2029, his first bronze sculpture, cast with Fonderia Perseo.