Mauro Gottardo was born in Bardonecchia (Turin) in 1965. He lives in Turin.

He attended the Franco Balbis Professional Institute where he specialized in graphics and different printing techniques. He later held screen printing courses for schools. During a period of work as a typographer he discovers his love for graphic art and lettering.

Mauro Gottardo is a fan of drawing with felt-tip pen on paper, a support that he loves especially if it has already a history, if it carries some traces. He works in absolute solitude, with the dedication of a medieval amanuensis – and with an inexorable trait – he draws hyper-realistic or strongly stylized figures. He draws accurately typographic characters by paginating them with human or animal figures, building posters produced in real narrative cycles, in which he takes years of work. He creates such works – surreal and dense with symbolic references – drawing on a small desk in a room crowded with sheets, rolls in horizontal sequences alternating with vertical visions. In the long rolls, made up by strips of juxtaposed sheets, the repetition of a subject is never an end in itself, but it articulates or punctuates the unfolding of a theme. In all his work there are literary, scientific and historical-political references; they are cryptographic ciphers, files in transparent envelopes, dossiers in different languages, in addition to what he calls scotchages: collages made of newspaper pieces taken and decontextualized, that he kept in large folders. Gottardo reads a lot and he is himself the author of original books.

«My inability to make compromises with life and the world is equal to my ability to draw always and anyway».