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Ignasi Monreal meets Gucci

Mixing a classical art background with digital dexterity, Ignasi Monreal’s illustrations touch on ancient, contemporary and sometimes completely surreal themes at once. There’s the knight on horseback checking his smartphone, Pegasus resting in a Gucci parking lot or a clique of girls sitting in the clouds, fishing for airplanes.

The young artist’s creative collaboration began with the first #GucciGram project in 2015, the GG Caleido and GG Blooms designs in the backdrop of a retro TV weather forecaster and commercial. These original illustrations later appeared as prints on T-shirts in the Cruise 2018 show held at Pitti Palace in Florence.

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Soon after, the Gucci Art Walls on New York’s Lafayette Street, and in Largo La Foppa, Milan, were painted with Ignasi Monreal’s design for Alessandro Michele’s first women’s fragrance Gucci Bloom. “Using the Italian Renaissance as a starting point, I created my own version of a ‘Locus Amoenus’, a literary term that refers to an idyllic place, a garden to escape from the city. The table depicted at the base of the wall shows the Florentine ‘pietre dure’ mosaic technique using marble and precious stones – inspired by my visit to the Museum Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence,” said the artist.

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For the holidays, Ignasi dreamed up a campaign of gods and titans. Illustrated entirely by him, Gucci Gift 2017 featured Greek mythology, alchemic codes and real places.
Synergic with the House’s eclectic narrative, for the Spring Summer 2018 campaign, Gucci Hallucination, the artist imagined paintings that feature imagery from classic works – including Ophelia (1852) by John Everett Millais – with characters dressed in the collection’s colorful and printed designs. He also starred in the campaign’s ironic video as the curator of a fictitious Gucci gallery.

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The surreal colourful illustrations from advertising campaign are printed on the new limited-edition line-up of T-shirts and sweatshirts, each one bearing a numbered label and special packaging featuring the artist’s digitally-illustrated work.

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