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 World — a saturated, joyful parallel dimension populated by hidden messages, signature blue UFOs, tiny televisions with legs, and small wry details waiting for the viewer who looks twice.

The Futuristic World is her own idea — though the name was sparked by a passing remark. After a year or two at Greenwich Market, a customer told her: “this is like a futuristic world you’re creating,” and the phrase captured something she already felt. The Futuristic World isn’t a series — it’s the parallel dimension all her collections live in, from her saturated cityscapes to the playful Laundry TVs she has been painting for years, with new ideas always arriving. 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 and showed there almost every Sunday for nearly two decades. In 2022 she and her best friend, the artist John Lynch, founded Hidden House Gallery — a studio gallery in Nunhead — moving it to Forest Hill in 2025, where an estate agency opens as a quirky little gallery each Sunday. Some of her 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.”