Joe Ramirez, who was born in San Francisco, has lived and worked in Berlin since 2007. He studied painting and film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, before working as a fresco painter. During the restoration of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Ramirez had the unique opportunity of viewing Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings up close.

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The journey in the hoist became a catalytic experience: the scenes from The Last Judgement rolled past him as in a painted film revealed in stop motion - the idea of “fresco cinema” was born.

The impression these images made never left him, and he went on to create something completely new, transforming them over a period  of 12 years into his own pictorial language: The Gold Projections.