Giorgia Rachel Donnan’s shady figures lie somewhere between sexy and grotesque

It’s safe to say that you wouldn’t wouldn’t want to find yourself up against one of Giorgia Rachel Donnan’s characters. With a mixture of pencil and graphite the Venice-based illustrator builds up shading to create bodies with rippling abs, bursting biceps and crushing quads. This desire to depict superhuman strength arose after Giorgia spent nearly two years working in an all-women photography studio, regularly surrounded by “extremely muscular and powerful figures”.

Giorgia’s works also have a distinctly devilish edge, as much of her work explores “the relationship between sexy and [the] grotesque”. This is also comes from her love of old Italian B-horror films; “I love the cheap gore, bright colours, terror and erotism of these movies”. Such visuals inspire her monstrous subjects – bearing their teeth and clasping knives in their mouths – and her perspectives.

Behind her characters and distorted dark cities and twisting patterns create the sense of an impenetrable hallucination. But Giorgia also weaves in banal, mundane moments, from a manicured hand scrolling through Google to a spot of shopping. Her portfolio perfectly blends the sinister and sensual with the absurd – and we’re totally here for it.