Federico Clapis (Italian, b. 1987) is a contemporary artist based in Milan who works across sculpture, painting, installation and video, often in a hyperrealist, figurative style. Technology recurs throughout his work as a metaphor for the contemporary, used to explore the human condition.
He made his first sculpture at ten, an accumulation of toys on a marble slab, and around age twenty began using art to explore hidden parts of himself. For years he worked “undercover” producing viral videos on social media that drew millions of followers and views, before moving away from pure entertainment in September 2015 to turn his online presence into a vehicle for sharing his art. Earlier in his artistic development, he began a long inner journey exploring the human soul, living for a time in an ashram in India and continuing his research in the West. Since 2017 he has used Instagram to invite followers to share their own feelings and reflections in the comments on his posts, treating their responses as an extension of the work.
