Lorena Lepori is an Italian painter born in Rome in 1974. She creates figurative paintings that inhabit worlds of beauty, theatricality and deliberate wrongness. Her characters are unapologetically constructed through gesture, adornment and attitude, occupying the image rather than simply posing within it. Elegance meets extravagance, seduction meets absurdity, and the historical meets the unmistakably contemporary. At the heart of her work is an act of interference: Lepori establishes a visual world the viewer recognizes, then quietly interferes with its logic. Unexpected details, cultural collisions and displaced elements belong naturally to the image even when they shouldn’t. With a distinctly deadpan humour, she uses the convincing language of realism to make the improbable feel entirely at home.