Anna Marra Gallery is pleased to present Fear of Loneliness, a solo exhibition by Mirko Leuzzi, curated by Vittoria Mascellaro. On view from September 25 to October 25, 2025, the exhibition inhabits the gallery’s spaces as a complex emotional geography — a journey that is not only physical, but deeply interior. It brings together a selection of works created between 2024 and 2025, some developed within the project Le mie mani (My Hands), and others conceived later as a natural continuation of that process.
Leuzzi’s practice began as a visceral, instinctive act — a figurative urgency that emerged during the pandemic and took root in a wounded existential condition. Through an evocative and layered visual language, the artist explores the affective dimension of existence, giving form to vulnerable bodies, interior landscapes, symbolic animals, and figures suspended between proximity and distance.
His research later took on a collective dimension through Le mie mani, an artist residency he founded in 2023. The project unfolded in three chapters, each dedicated to a specific theme: emotional blockages (2023), affective manipulation in relationships (2024), and finally, the fear of loneliness (2025). The first two editions took place at the Ca’ Vamperti farmhouse in the Florentine hills, while the third was held on the island of Alicudi, where the artist spent a week with six participants from diverse fields — philosophy, literature, music, psychology, and theatre — creating a true symposium on the most remote of the Aeolian Islands. There, the project became a process of revelation: a slow emergence of fears, desires, and inner conflicts that take shape through painting.
With Fear of Loneliness, Leuzzi’s practice reaches a point of emergence, where collective experiences and individual processes converge to form an open, stratified narrative. While the works born within Le mie mani document a phase of intense relational experimentation, those created afterward stem from a more intimate and autonomous urgency. They continue and amplify the same inquiry, revealing how Leuzzi’s painterly language remains fueled by a living emotional tension — one that transforms personal experience into shared form.
Leuzzi builds a visual language where fragility, archetypes, and inner visions intertwine. His paintings stage bodies oscillating between attraction and distance, totemic animals, and still yet traversed figures, immersed in dense, vibrating spaces. The visual narrative invites viewers to confront the complexity of emotional relationships, unmasking mechanisms of control and dependence often hidden beneath the surface of love. The seductive aesthetic — with its vivid colors and evocative compositions — heightens the tension between appearance and truth, between desire and wound.
The strength of the exhibition lies in Leuzzi’s ability to challenge the boundary between autobiography and the collective dimension. Fear of Loneliness constructs, through painting, a shared space in which what is usually left unspoken can finally be revealed.
