LA BOH is a visual artist and performer born in Turin on March 1st, 1975. Her connection to art is deep and innate: drawing and painting have always been her refuge and a means of salvation. Raised in a family environment that did not recognize her creative calling, she fully rediscovered and embraced her artistic identity only in adulthood, through a cathartic process akin to an eruption, sweeping away and rewriting her past.
After leaving her studies in Foreign Languages and Literature, she moved to Milan to graduate in Fashion Design at the Marangoni Institute. For over fifteen years, she worked in the fashion world as a designer, but following motherhood and a complex personal journey, she distanced herself from the industry. In 2016, after freeing herself from an abusive relationship, she began painting with renewed urgency, driven by an authentic, visceral impulse.
This is when LA BOH was born, a stage name that plays with the letters of her first and last names, as well as the childlike expression “boh,” symbolizing an ongoing existential search.
Her first approach to art was through abstract, ethereal, and dreamlike watercolors. Over time, her style evolved toward more intense and dramatic figurative painting, where the gaze often becomes the expressive core: a means to establish an intimate, direct dialogue with the viewer. Her figures, often dressed with an almost ritualistic care, reveal a double obsession: the body and clothing as layers of meaning. In her nudes, the absence of clothing becomes a metaphor for the loss of identity.
Self-portraits occupy a central role in her work. They are gestures of centering, recognition, and awareness. Some of these portraits accompany her daily life, like silent mirrors reflecting her presence and resilience. In 2024, at the age of 49, LA BOH chose to attend evening classes at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts to engage with new perspectives and sharpen her artistic direction. Her painting rejects technicalities and unnecessary decoration. It is an inner gesture, an emotional flow. Every work is an existential statement: “I paint, therefore I am.” The aim is not representation, but connection. For LA BOH, the artwork is an emotional bridge between artist and viewer.
The theme of women is strongly present in her work: the daily experience of male cultural aggression, still evident in the art world and beyond, fuels an expressive urgency connected to the feminine, to vulnerability as an aspect of the human condition, and to the strength that emerges from it.
Photography is often the starting point for her pictorial reinterpretation: evocative images become the foundation for a material gesture that overlays vision and intuition. Among her visual references are Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Giovanni Gastel. In terms of painting, she admires Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Georgia O’Keeffe, Keith Haring, as well as the Fauvist movement.
On a technical level, LA BOH is exploring a handcrafted method of canvas preparation, which generates irregular, imperfect material effects, giving the surfaces a lived-in and poetic quality. LA DONNA IN VESTAGLIA, INTORNO, LEI, E, and MY JOY are part of this period.