Simone Artego

Simone Bordignon Różycki, known as Artego, is an Italian-Polish artist from Vercelli in Italy's Piedmont region. Trained at the Alciati Fine Art High School, he developed an early passion fuelled by video games, cartoons and hip-hop culture, honing a distinctive ballpoint pen technique before branching into painting and sculpture. Between 2014 and 2016 he hitchhiked 34,000 kilometres across Europe, chronicling the journey in the Italian newspaper La Sesia.

A symbolic dice roll brought him to Amsterdam in October 2016, where he settled in the De Pijp neighbourhood. The artist divides his time between a bronze sculpture studio and mural work on the city's streets. Solo and group exhibitions — "Passion" at Go Gallery and the Kimpton de Witt Hotel (2021), "Queens" at Go Gallery (2022), and a residency at the Sofitel Legend The Grand — have established his presence in the Dutch contemporary art scene.

Straddling fine art and street art, Artego resists easy categorisation. Painting, drawing, sculpture and urban interventions feed into a practice shaped by cultural references, dark humour and a classical sense of craft inherited from his European upbringing.