Embroidery never seemed as dark and suggestive as in the art of London-based Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri. In his meticulous work, he transforms old discarded family photographs into three-dimensional objects with intense psychological evocations. “The intimate human action of embroidery is a ritual of making and reshaping stories and the history of these people,” he says. Anzeri uses synthetic hair as his thread of choice, which he stitches and sews to create a material and metaphorical medium representing bodily boundaries and biographies. The portraits he creates are both beautiful and unnerving. Masked faces of someone’s long-forgotten relatives radiate new expression, which reinvents old stories through an unexpected and new visual language. Last year, Anzeri was selected as one of thirty emerging artists to be considered for the 2008 Sovereign European Art Prize, and recently his work was added to the renowned Saatchi Online Collection, a digital platform for upcoming young talents. This fall, he‘ll be showing alongside six other artists who explore the bounderies of conventional photography, titled Starting With a Photograph, at the Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London from September 10 – October 12.