Hold Me Up, Even Just for a Moment

Artist Giulia Neri

Title Hold Me Up, Even Just for a Moment

Technique Fine art print

Paper German Etching 310 g

Printed in Milan by Fratelli Bonvini 1909

Print run 80 copies, signed and numbered by hand by the artist, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity

Format 80 x 60 cm

Unramed

Giulia Neri spent years working as a psychologist before she understood that she was already doing the same work - only with a different tool. She lives in a small village in the Italian Dolomites and makes illustrations that sit at the exact boundary where visual art and interior life meet: not explaining emotion, but drawing close enough that something shifts.

Her work has appeared in Time Magazine, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, and La Repubblica. Since 2022 some of it has hung in the Galleria Farnesina at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has not left the village.

The writer Federico Pace described the experience of looking at her illustrations as "setting out on a journey across the vast continent of human bonds." He was not wrong.

Exclusive to Australia.

A few steps off Corso Lodi in Milan, a stationery and print shop has been open since 1909. Costante and Luigia Bonvini founded it as the neighbourhood's place for paper and ink. More than a century later, the original presses still run.

In 2014, a group of friends rescued the shop from disappearing, restoring it with architects who specialise in cultural heritage. The machines - a 19th-century platen press, an Imperial Cylinder Press, a Heidelberg Stella - were returned to working order.

Bonvini 1909 is now part print shop, part gallery, part cultural institution. Every piece carries the particular character that only a hand-fed press can produce - the slight variation, the impression in the paper, the evidence of a human hand.