New York–based contemporary artist Laura Ciccarello will present new work with Mido Gallery (Booth C14) at CONTEXT Art Miami, running December 2–7, 2025 during Art Basel Week.
Known for its international collector base and sharp curation, CONTEXT is an ideal platform for Ciccarello’s fashion inspired fine art.
Ciccarello’s path is unconventional but increasingly relevant. While balancing a successful career in fashion and manufacturing, she developed a visual language rooted in transformation, narrative, and cultural symbolism. Her paintings build on this foundation, merging refined surface techniques with bold gestures that balance market-ready polish and conceptual substance.
Laura Ciccarello
“When someone experiences my art, I want them to feel a connection—whether to themselves, others, or something bigger. My goal is to create space for reflection and recognition,” she says.
“If they walk away feeling excitement or curiosity, my mission is accomplished.”
Many of her works are influenced by fashion. Karl Lagerfeld Is Really Chuck Norris was inspired by a story told by her friend and Chanel buyer Courtney Flanagan; Coco Chanel, I Heart Fear and Loathing in New York, and Queen of the Aztec Desert evolved from prints in her former accessories collection she designed. James Bond—Shooting Hearts began as a pocket-square concept for a collaboration with Deion Sanders that never launched, later transforming into a new growing art series.
Materially, Ciccarello combines gouache, lenticular printing, and meticulous sketching to explore tension, transformation, and emotional intensity. Gouache allows layered, tactile surfaces, while lenticular prints introduce shifting motion and depth, revealing hidden images as viewers change position—mirroring themes of identity, repression, and release.
Ciccarello is looking forward to for her Art Basel debut and is exploring gallery opportunities in Europe and Asia as early as February 2026. “I welcome any opportunity where my work fits, and encourage any global organizations to reach out that have upcoming events involving art in which I may be able to contribute to. I love to travel and I love a challenging art project even more. I have been fortunate enough to work with major brands as well as celebrities through my personal contacts in the past, and shifting into art feels like a new beginning with so much potential. It has been so inspiring to see the support of my good friends, family, peers and mentors in my industry encouraging my life long goal to pursue art.” she says.
On risk: “Everything is a risk in some form. Selling desire is universal. Selling ideas requires vulnerability. Art is rare and a luxury by nature—each piece is singular or limited.”
She doesn’t miss the breakneck pace of fashion design. Starting her design career at 18 while studying at FIT, she learned the industry pre-Photoshop, when highly detailed flats and fashion designs were rendered for at times for hours on end, entirely by hand. Though she loved design, she also experienced the harsher side of the mid-2000s fashion world—image-driven, unforgiving, and often unregulated.
“Alexa, play “Hard-Knock-Life by Jay-Z,” she joked.
Corporate culture, she notes, has become more humane: “The Devil-Wears-Prada characters of the past are now out of style. Policy changes have thankfully made awful behaviors towards others in the workplace impossible to survive. For example, I was always an entrepreneur even as a kid, yet one corporation I worked for made me give up the eponymous collection of jewelry and accessories I had designed that was selling in a top wholesale showroom, even though it was a non-competing product. In order to have an opportunity with this company, they made me choose working for them or my collection. The line was profitable and did not fail, I was simply baited by promises from a company that never came to fruition and lead down the wrong path for many years after.”
Ciccarello added, “I’m so glad though that the fashion business has become much less into sanctioning those who work in it, enhanced transparency, and has prioritized accountability. My hope is my generation was the last who has suffered working for out of touch companies.”
And on beauty as strategy in art and design?
“Absolutely. Beauty is a Trojan horse. You lure people in with allure, then confront them with something more surprising. Aim to captivate and make moments memorable when you can.”
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