Maurizo Cannavacciuolo (b. 1954 Italy) is a cosmopolitan, transcultural, and nomadic soul – part painter, part architect, part philosopher, and part writer, he is a critical observer who is blessed with an acute sense of the ridiculous and the absurd. Cannavacciuolo animates surfaces with intricate and intense drawings. These renderings can be vibrant or almost invisible and often overwhelming. Cannavacciuolo networks patterns and images taken from popular culture, natural history, anthropology, architecture, and posed snapshots taken by, or of himself, into his work. His source materials are turned into slides which he projects onto a wall or a canvas then traces in pencil, ink, or paint. It is not unusual to see an Art Nouveau wall paper pattern mixed with American comic book characters, grinning heads from a dentist’s display the artist encountered in Bangkok, African tribal carvings from a glossy coffee table book, insects, and the vaulted ceiling of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, all positioned together in unpredictable sizes and combinations. Each composition is a very personal world which encourages viewers to create their own adventure. Maurizio Cannavacciuolo has had solo exhibitions at Sprovieri Progetti, London, Allegra Ravizza Art Project, Milano, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Museu da Republica-Galeria Catete, Rio de Janerio, and Sperone Westwater, New York. His works are present in several collections including the Foreign Ministry in Rome, the Naples Metro, the Muze Savremene Umjetnosti of Sarajevo, the Italian Embassy in Tel Aviv, and the Italian Embassy in Santiago, Chile. Cannavacciuolo's roots are in Naples. His extensive travels led him to study, live, and explore the Far East, Cuba and most especially, India and Thailand. He currently lives in Rome.

Maurizio Cannavacciuolo spent his residency in the fall of 2003 wandering through the galleries looking at the collection and the building, exploring the conservation labs, and talking to everyone on staff. He also spent many hours exploring Mrs. Gardner's collection of rare books, her personal travel scrapbooks and several guest books. Cannavacciuolo was particularly interested in Gardner's Cuba-Mexico-Denmark scrapbook. From these he selected images for possible use in his own work. In all, some three hundred images were gathered in the form of slides to add to his supply of resources. A year later, Cannavacciuolo returned to the Gardner and spent five weeks creating two elaborate wall drawings in the special exhibition gallery with the help of four assistants. This site-specific work was literally drawn before the very eyes of museum visitors, who were able to view the process through a window built into the gallery door. During the installation of TV Dinner, Cannavacciuolo also created and distributed to all museum staff and volunteers the 18th version of his "Notebooks on Taste" entitled, Guardian Angles of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This handmade edition of 200 included a list of all of the guards who had worked at the museum from the time it opened in 1903 to the present (2004) in the order of the year they were hired. In 2007, Cannavacciuolo returned again for a talk entitled Be Very Happy in which the artist chronicled what had happened to him from the time he had first set foot in the museum to the present day using his work to illustrate his narrative.

Maurizio Cannavacciuolo: TV Dinner