Gold, surface, light.

Irene Zenoni is an Italian abstract artist with a goldsmith lineage, whose work explores material heritage, spatial concepts and a painterly approach grounded in abstraction.

Vicenza, her hometown, has a long tradition in the goldsmith industry. Her family background gave her early, practical experience with gold and its qualities, its warmth, its behaviour under light, well before she pursued art professionally.

Gold enters her canvases not as ornament but as an active element, shifting with light and in dialogue with shadow, depth, and colour. The premise is an old one: for centuries, gold in painting was not a colour but light. The painting changes over the course of a day and is never the same twice.

"I work with gold as leaf and paint, and it does not behave. It refuses to sit still under light. It changes the moment you move. It is leaf and medium, an image of the thing rather than the thing itself. To work with it, I first had to understand everything it had already been made to mean."

Irene Zenoni

Before painting, she studied Architecture at Central Saint Martins in London and completed a degree in Fashion Business Economics from Istituto Marangoni in Milan. This spatial, aesthetic, and analytical combination continues to shape how she structures a surface and reads the relationship between surface and light.

Several years in the Italian fashion and luxury industries followed: sustained, close work with surface and finish, with how a material is judged by hand and by eye before it is judged by name.

She turned to painting to explore the relationship between gold, light, and perception.

Her paintings invite viewers to engage with them over time, reflecting attention, restraint, and a deep familiarity with a single material.