Elettra Gorni

Elettra Gorni (b. 1967, Suzzara, Mantua, Italy) is an Italian artist, researcher, and teacher whose principal medium is mokuhanga (Japanese water-based woodblock printing). She holds an M.A. (with distinction) in History of Modern Art from Ca' Foscari University, Venice (1996), and a B.A. (with distinction) in Sculpture from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan (2012). She works between painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and mokuhanga, and currently lives in Milan.

After her 1996 art-history degree from Ca' Foscari, Gorni worked as a cartoonist before beginning a new artistic trajectory in 2005. Her enrolment at the Brera Academy in 2005 marked the beginning of her parallel commitment to studio practice, and during her Brera training she began the mokuhanga research that has since become her principal field of artistic inspiration, study, and teaching. Her artistic practice is shaped explicitly by the visual-rhetorical economies of old Japanese books and prints — she describes herself as inspired by 'the simple shapes, monochrome palette with only a few colors, and the void' of historical Japanese woodblock illustration. The mokuhanga technique, with its capacity for flat tonal layering, hand-rubbed application of sumi ink and watercolours on Japanese kozo white paper, suits her interest in 'simple, meditative, flat images with a strong power of evocation.'

Gorni presented at the International Mokuhanga Conference (IMC) on the topic 'Mokuhanga Technique at the Service of Visual Narration: a sample of a set of ten prints,' positioning her practice within the international mokuhanga community of working artists, educators, and theorists. The IMC paper presentation establishes her academic-research orientation alongside her studio practice — she treats the mokuhanga medium as a vehicle for narrative serial development, and her print suites accumulate as visual storyboards rather than as standalone images.

Her Saatchi Art profile (active since 2010) presents 76 artworks in printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and drawing. Documented mokuhanga prints include 'OJIZOUSAMA' (2008, woodcut on paper, 9.6 × 11 inches, hand-rubbed using sumi ink and watercolours on Japanese kozo white paper) — a print depicting the Japanese roadside Jizō Buddha figure — alongside 'Florilandia,' 'Wooden Head' (edition of 5), 'Tempo (Time),' 'Self-portrait as Japanese Mask' (edition of 10), and the 'EGREGORE' series (e.g. 'EGREGORE #1: Why Nobody Loves Me?,' edition of 10). The 'Jizōsama,' 'Japanese mask,' and 'EGREGORE' titles together signal her sustained iconographic engagement with Japanese folk-religious and mask-theatre imagery.

Her mokuhanga editions are characteristically small (often editions of 1, 5, or 10), reflecting both the labour-intensiveness of the hand-rubbed water-based printing technique and the sculptural-collectible orientation of her output. The Saatchi Art platform circulates her work to international collectors, and she has been featured in multiple curated collections including 'Art And Culture,' 'Curated Salon Wall Nº9,' and 'Affordable Flowers.' She maintains an active teaching practice in Milan, with mokuhanga as her principal pedagogical medium.

Within the contemporary international mokuhanga community Gorni is the principal Italian voice. Her practice exemplifies the southern-European mokuhanga tradition that has emerged through the IMC conference network and through the Italian cartooning, animation, and historical-art-research milieu in which she trained. Her dual academic credentials (Brera + Ca' Foscari) and her sustained 20-year mokuhanga commitment together place her at the intersection of Italian academic art-history scholarship and contemporary international mokuhanga practice. Future research could extend her bio through Italian-language gallery catalogues from the Milan and Mantua region, the Brera Academy's printmaking faculty publications, and the IMC paper-presentation archive.