Featured in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2019 exhibition Kaleidoscope, the present work demonstrates Benedetto Pietromarchi’s interest in the relationship between nature and artifice. Created using traditional materials and manual techniques, his sculptural works are at once familiar and otherworldly, tinged with a sense of surreal displacement. Classically trained at the Accademia delle Belle Arte in Carrara, as well as the Architectural Association of Architecture in London, Pietromarchi found inspiration in the work of Joseph Beuys and Giuseppe Penone, and spent time working for Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely in the Tarot Garden at Pescia Fiorentina. The artist has travelled widely, spending fifteen years in London – where he was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Foundation Fellowship in 2009 – as well as a further five years in Berlin before returning to his native Rome. In 2015 he became the inaugural artist-in-residence at The Owner’s Cabin: a merchant ship travelling from Uruguay to the Netherlands. His itinerant tendencies play into his fascination with ‘psychogeography’: a term defined by Guy Debord in 1955, referring to humankind’s emotional and psychological engagement with their physical environment.