Inside the unexpected collaboration between Marni’s Francesco Risso and artists Slawn and Soldier

Last year, Francesco Risso, creative director of Marni, spent a month sharing a studio with Nigerian artists Slawn and Soldier. The results were surprising, encompassing an enigmatic mix of art and design, a body of work including both paintings and Baroque Italian furniture given a contemporary twist.

The results make up the exhibition, ‘The Pink Sun’, taking place at Risso’s palazzo in Milan in collaboration with Saatchi Yates, Risso’s private residence opening to the public, by appointment, for the event. Debuting after the Marni show during Milan Fashion Week A/W 2025, on 26 February, the exhibition will run until 14 April 2025. The results, curated by Alex Sossah, merge joyfully bright pop references with the cultural canon in a rebellious celebration of rococo.

‘With Slawn and Soldier, it was never a decision, it was a pull, an inevitability,’ says Risso on the unexpected partnership. ‘We met through my partner Alex, through London, through late nights and long conversations. There was an immediate, almost gravitational connection, three energies colliding, distinct yet speaking the same language, a language built on instinct, on movement, on rebellion.’

Rather than eschewing differences in style, the creative collaboration celebrates them with an emphasis on both street style and traditional craft. ‘This wasn’t about finding common ground; it was about celebrating the contradictions, the chaos, the tension between us. Soldier’s precision, Slawn’s raw spontaneity, my own obsession with texture and process – it all just fitted, like threads of the same story unravelling and reweaving themselves in real-time. The obstacles, the borders, the distance – none of it mattered. We created in fragments, in bursts of urgency, in a shared refusal to be bound by expectation.

‘When we finally stood together, side by side, hands moving freely, it felt like a liberation. This work, “The Pink Sun”, isn’t just what we made, it’s how we made it. It’s the process, the friction, the joy, the fight. It’s a conversation that doesn’t need to end.’

Slawn, Francesco Risso and Soldier present ‘The Pink Sun’ 26 February – 14 April 2025