David Sommariva, born in Lodi in 1972, is a contemporary artist whose research moves between hyperrealist painting, pop art, and urban imagery. From a young age, he showed a strong interest in drawing and the representation of reality, passions that led him to graduate from the Callisto Piazza Art School and then from Milan Polytechnic, where he specialized in Architecture, Design, and Interior Design. After years of collaboration with studios in Milan and Brescia, he founded the creative laboratory Monkey Garage, where he experimented with fusions of art, design, and fashion. During this phase, he developed a precise aesthetic vision, which led him to painting as his primary medium. His hyperrealist technique is distinguished by an almost photographic accuracy and an extraordinarily precise trompe l’oeil rendering, achieved using acrylic paints applied in thin, meticulous layers.

Sommariva recreates oxidized metal surfaces, cracks, bolts, and fragments of time-worn stickers, constructing imaginary walls that evoke a post-industrial, dystopian world. These “canvas-walls” feature pop icons —from Mickey Mouse to Daffy Duck, from Wile E. Coyote to symbols and logos of mass culture—which the artist decontextualizes and humanizes, restoring their vulnerability, melancholy, and irony. In this dialogue between reality and illusion, memory and decay, Sommariva transforms pop culture myths into metaphors of collective memory, highlighting the fragility and beauty of passing time. His works, charged with nostalgia and reflection, become pictorial chronicles of a possible future, in which traces of the present survive as poetic relics. He lives and works in Lodi, where he has transformed his home into a studio, and his works are part of public and private collections in Italy and abroad.

Selected Exhibitions and Awards

• Solo exhibition, Galleria Maiocchi15, Milan, 2025 
• AmARS II, Tolomeo Art Space, Milan, 2020