Davide Quayola, known as Quayola, is an Italian artist, born in Rome and based in London for nearly two decades, who uses custom software to build hybrid compositions between the real and the artificial, the figurative and the abstract.Landscape painting, classical sculpture, and religious iconography serve as recurring points of departure for his work.
In 2013, Quayola and Memo Akten won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica for their collaboration Forms.,In Topologies, a multichannel audiovisual installation shown at the Elektra festival, algorithms reinterpret classical paintings by Velázquez and Tiepolo, turning them into moving, crumpled paper-like geometric forms.For his 2016 solo show “Iconographies” at NOME gallery in Berlin, he rendered Renaissance and Baroque paintings by Botticelli, Rubens, and Caravaggio into abstract, computationally derived engravings and Ditone prints.
In Sculpture Factory, a programmed industrial robot carves marble in homage to Michelangelo's unfinished non-finito sculptures such as the Laocoön Group.,In 2019, “Asymmetric Archaeology – Gazing Machines” at HOW Art Museum in Shanghai became his first large-scale solo exhibition in China, filling eight sections with more than 50 works across digital print, video, sculpture, and robotic installation.For Frieze London 2023, Jardins d'Été, made with LG OLED, layered vivid 4K screens with the floral imagery of Old Masters paintings.In 2024 he installed Hercules and Nessus #A_01, a monumental unfinished marble sculpture carved by a robotic arm, at the entrance of Diriyah Art Futures in Saudi Arabia.
Storms, presented at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 through bitforms gallery, Art on Tezos, and objkt one, turns ultra high definition footage of stormy Cornish seas into computational paintings, with a 50-piece companion collection, Storms XS, generated from an analysis of wave behavior at specific moments in time.,“Machines are instructed to look at what I want to explore, and that is a crucial part of my artistic gesture”, Quayola has said of the process.His work entered the Toledo Museum of Art's 2025 exhibition “The Art of Algorithms”, his first major museum exhibition in the United States, alongside artists including Anna Ridler, Sofia Crespo, Tyler Hobbs, and Vera Molnár.He has also contributed to Mapping, Casa Batlló's annual commission to project audiovisual work onto Gaudí's Barcelona façade, a program that began in 2022 with Refik Anadol.
