Julia de Ruvo – poster campaign for Carl Kostyál

Poster campaign for the gallery Carl Kostyál around Julia de Ruvo’s exhibition – bringing the gallery’s international art audience out into the city.

About Julia de Ruvo

Julia de Ruvo (b. 1993, Stockholm) is one of the most talked-about young voices in Swedish contemporary art. After studying at Konstskolan in Stockholm, with a focus on life drawing and portrait painting, her practice has since developed to be largely self-taught. De Ruvo paints in acrylic with muted palettes and matt surfaces, depicting her subjects – often drawn from her own circle of family, friends and lovers – with a humorous yet charged gaze. Exaggerated features, partly hidden faces and a recurring tension between the tame and the wild give her portraits a sense of mystery and intimacy, while icons such as mobile phones, cigarettes and Nike swooshes anchor the figures in contemporary pop culture.

De Ruvo made her international debut with the solo exhibition “I Promise I Don’t Bite” (2022) at Guts Gallery in London, and has since exhibited at galleries such as Steve Turner in Los Angeles and Carl Kostyál in Stockholm. Her latest solo exhibition, “Soft Teeth” – nine paintings made over seven months, an intimate exploration of human relationships – was shown at Carl Kostyál at Hospitalet in Stockholm.

The campaign

Carl Kostyál engaged StreetPromotion to run a poster campaign around Julia de Ruvo’s exhibition, with the aim of bringing the gallery’s international art audience out into the physical city. Through strategically placed posters in areas with a strong presence of art lovers, we created visibility for the exhibition beyond the gallery’s own walls – a way of letting de Ruvo’s distinctive visual language meet a wider audience on the street, in keeping with the intimacy and curiosity that define her work.

Result

The campaign helped strengthen interest in Julia de Ruvo’s exhibition, took the gallery’s communication beyond traditional art spaces, and made one of Scandinavia’s most promising young artists visible to a wider audience in public space.