Maria Luisa Azzini

A parallel universe, painted by hand.

Maria Luisa Azzini is a Florence-born, London-based painter who has spent more than two decades building what she calls The Futuristic Parallel World — a saturated, joyful universe of imagined cities populated by hidden messages, signature blue UFOs, tiny televisions with legs, and small wry details waiting for the viewer who looks twice.

The series got its name not from her, but from a customer. After painting cities for a year or two at Greenwich Market, someone said: “this is like a futuristic world you’re creating.” And she said yes. The work isn’t a stylistic choice; it’s how she has always seen things.

Her cities are real places dreamt differently: London with its skyline rebuilt in pop-art colour, Paris reimagined in sunset oranges, New York after dark with the lights left on. Self-taught, she sold her first pieces at Greenwich Market in 2002, where she has shown her originals and prints almost every Sunday since — and some clients have been collecting her since the beginning, twenty years on.

— “I always believed in parallel worlds. Since I was six or seven, I used to write stories about parallel realities. I always believed there was something extraordinary.”