He turned Barack Obama into Abraham Lincoln, co-wrote records with the cult songwriter Daniel Johnston, and disguised his children as Batman and Robin. In his world, Snoopy might land into Picasso's "Guernica", Walt Disney characters sit at "The Last Supper" and the rock'n'roll of the Kiss breaks into Manet's "The Luncheon on the Grass". No, Ron English is not a prankster with a passion for arty jokes, yet instead one of the wittiest interpreters of that contemporary art branch born and flourished away from the traditional gallery circuits.
Somebody labels him as a street artist, because it's right on the streets where his crazy imaginary got molded. Somebody else calls him pop surrealist, 'cause he has a real and fully warholian mania for Marilyn, Elvis and any other icon of modernity. Others consider him as one of the fathers of Culture Jamming, the movement for a creative sabotage of advertising, as for years he flung his colorful iconoclast fury against billboards promoting cigarettes, computers and fast-food sandwiches. As a matter of fact all of these definitions don't fit right to the 51 year old American Ron English.
One of a kind artist, he's been capable of taking his ironic and sharp works everywhere: from the curbs of American cities, to museums across the world, passing through the wall separating the West Bank from Israel (during an unforgettable "raid" in 2007 with the colleagues, and guerrilla art superstars, Banksy and Swoon). Now, thanks to Absolut Wallpaper, Ron English finally arrives in Italy, too.

The artistic background of Gionata Gesi, born 1975 in Pontedera, is enclosed within the path which led him to be fully identified with his streetname: Ozmo.
While Ozmo takes off from the world of comics and quickly gets to trains and walls all over Italy, Gionata goes through all the stages of the "official" education, at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts first, and an MA in Visual Arts in Como right after.
The two "souls" rejoin in 2001 when Gionata settles in Milan and becomes one of the pioneers of the Italian street-art movement. While his provocative iconoclasm gathers awareness at art galleries, the city walls (and most of all the one right outside the Leonkavallo squat) get covered with his works, in which the traditional spray can meets new media such as stickers or posters. Nevertheless: «I've always liked to wink both at "high" and underground culture», admits the artist today. Ozmo operates like a hip-hop producer would: he observes the reality of today's cities and its contradictions, then "stealing" small meaningful portions of it - exactly like you do when sampling music - and eventually connecting them together like letters of an imaginary urban alphabet.

Deborah Ann Dyer, worldwide known simply as Skin, was born in 1967 in Brixton, the caribbean and multi-ethnic area of London.
Growing up among the reggae vibes and hip hop music blasting out of her neighbors' flats, as a young girl she already shows that rebel attitude which will lately define her whole artistic path. Skunk Anansie, the iconic band of the british alternative rock golden era, soon originate under the halo of her controversial personality.
In 1995, only one year after the band is born, Skunk Anansie are already a musical and lifestyle word of mouth. 3 albums (Paranoid & Sunburnt, Stoosh and Post Orgasmic Chill) and four million copies later, Skin declares her group disbanded.
Yet the iconical woman of brit-rock, with her shaved head and provocative lyrics, doesn't disappear releasing 2 solo albums, and pursuing several and multifaceted project.
Skin has always kept a special relationship with Italy, nurtured by the love from her fans and by many aknowledgements and renewed today by the Wallpaper she's designed for the Absolut Wall project. On Sept 15th, Skin celebrated the reunion of Skunk Anansie, hitting the record stores' shelves with the album Smashes and Trashes.

After completing his architecture studies in Milan, Giovanni Pagani immediately understood design was his future. Hence, in 1995, he opened the Giò Pagani Arch. Design Studio, and he did it in a small village outside Reggio Emilia: Ponte Enza di Gattatico. From there, Giò took off to conquer the world. Well, actually, if you think about the work of this multifaceted and “made in Italy” creative artist, it’d be more appropriate to say “conquer the worlds”. Indeed, as Pagani’s works apply to the most diverse fields, thanks to a smooth crossover attitude: private houses, offices, hotels and restaurants, but also to fashion and fitness (only to name a few examples).
As a true great designer, Pagani can’t really give himself any limits. And thus, when you go through the list of those brands he’s worked for along the years, you will find such names as Mutina, Viabizzuno, Cappellini, Armani.
The collaboration with Wall&Decò, the Italian company specialised in a real taylor-made remake of tapestry, is another Giò’s idea, the one which got us into inviting him into the Absolut world. It’s a project born in 2004, which subverts the concept of wallpapers, turning an old domestic decoration into an explosive expression of creativity.

Alessandro Guerriero is somebody who likes to change the rules. He’s been doing it for over 30 years. At least since when, in 1976, he estabilished Alchimia, the collective of designers who gave the Italian “post-avanguardia” a face and ideas. If there’s a scheme to blow up, a reality to bend or just a thought to give color to, Guerriero never withdraws.
He speaks with his own vocabulary. A vocabulary in which the adjective to go next to the word “Design” is “Romantic” (this is how he appoints the theory he approaches his work with).
Guerriero’s works are everywhere - from Tokyo’s Modern Art Museum, to NYC’s Metropolitan - but his caleidoscopic look has also laid on spaces less architecture or design-proof. Alessandro Guerriero has reinvented magazines (like when in ‘88 he edited OLLO - Magazine without a Message/Rivista senza Messaggio), concerts and theatres (with his set-designs for Matia Bazar and Magazzini Criminali), jailhouses (with the Cooperativa del Granserraglio, made of inmates on semicustody), schools (giving birth, in 1987, to the Domus Academy and eventually, in ‘95, to Ravenna’s Futurarium, a didactic laboratory where to learn the “fade of disciplines”). Winner of the “Compasso d’Oro” in 1982, Alessandro Guerriero is today teacher at Milan’s Politecnico and President of NABA, the New Academy Of Fine Arts in Milan.