Daniele Cima was born in 1950 into a Milanese family that had been playing an active part in the city's cultural and artistic scene since the mid-nineteenth century, in particular in the areas of poetry, literature, journalism, music, painting and caricature. His grandfather on his mother's side - Marino Parenti - was a versatile cultural exponent who founded and headed the Bagutta literary prize, as well as being an esteemed painter. Having attended courses in classic, scientific and technical subjects and invariably achieved the same dire results, Cima suddenly found his path in 1967, thanks to the film “Blow up” by Michelangelo Antonioni, which revealed to him the existence of an opposed world. Opposed to the gloom of school, opposed to the catholic-bourgeois discipline, opposed to the antiquated mind-set, opposed to the greyness of those years. A free world dominated by creativity. It was precisely the world he wanted to live in, not least because Jane Birkin lived there. Inspired by the words of Vladimir Majakovskij “We must stop screaming at the evils and carbuncles of advertising and instead push artists and writers to it” (1922) and of Fortunato Depero “The art of the future will be powerfully advertising” (1931) and guided by graphic artist and painter Mario Ballocco, he began studying graphic design, at last finding a discipline capable of arousing and stimulating his interest. Later, aided by his uncle Gino Negri, an eclectic musician but also the vivacious author of advertising slogans, including the famous “Cin-Cin Cinzano”, Cima joined Young & Rubicam to work as an assistant for Raymond Gfeller, the successful Swiss Art Director, so launching himself into a head-spinning tour of the advertising companies in Milan. In 1973, he became Art Director at the newly established TBWA, alongside the Creative Directors Köbi Wiesendanger and Renato Granata, and later at CPV Kenyon & Eckhardt, with Luigi Montaini, Marco Vecchia and Pasquale Barbella. Ever attracted by alternative directions, he spent a short summer at a small - and disappointing - agency in Bologna, from which he fled to open Realität in 1976, the first (and perhaps only) cooperative advertising agency. This unique adventure saw the participation, among others, of Daniele Ravenna, Paolo Del Bravo and Carlo Tosi. After this experience, which lasted a couple of years, Cima collaborated with Pirella and Goettsche's Italia/BBDO for a few months, before landing - for five long and happy years - at Pubblimarket, a brilliant Italian agency run by Nicolò I. Caimi as a subsidiary of London's legendary Collett Dickenson & Pearce, “unique in being totally focused on the production of outstanding advertising”. In this new experience, he was once again accompanied by Daniele Ravenna and Paolo Del Bravo. In 1981, he was appointed the agency's Creative Director, and later took up the same role at Troost Campbell-Ewald (Lowe Group): here - for the Gucci campaign - he began his collaboration with great international photographers, such as Dominique Issermann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Charlotte March, David Seidner, Christian Vogt. A good habit that Cima maintained throughout his career and which later led him to work with people like Bob Brooks,  John Claridge, Terence Donovan, Graham Ford, Hunter Freeman, Piero Gemelli, Robert Golden, Tom Jacoby, Barry Meekums, David Stewart, Ivo von Renner, Reinhart Wolf… In 1986, Daniele Cima, Manuela Cifarelli and Ernesto Gismondi opened Milano (Italy), a creative boutique dedicated to brands with a high image content (such as Artemide, Castelli, Flou, Henry Cotton's, Kartell, Lorenz…), in which he collaborated once again with his friend Daniele Ravenna. The company was soon sold to DDB, and the two took on the roles of Executive Creative Directors of Verba DDB, which Cima left in 1990 to take up the same role in JWT. He subsequently worked at Impact (Y&R Group) and BBDO, which, after five years as Executive Creative Director and Executive Vice-President, he left due to his saturation and lack of motivation towards the world of agencies, that were becoming increasingly less compatible with his artistic vision of advertising: Daniele has always seen himself as an advertising artist, not as an advertising professional. Considered a veritable “Maestro”, during his career as an Art Director and Creative Director he has received a great number of awards, both in Italy and abroad, but he’s very aware that they’re not Nobel Prize, so for about twenty years he has renounced to participate in this kind of events. Inspired by the winner of a real Nobel Prize - Mr Albert Einstein - ("You'll never find rainbows if you're look down") and by a real genius - Mr Frank Zappa - (“A mind is like a parachute, it doesn’t work if it isn’t open”), at the turn of the millennium he opened Officima, his laboratory of communication arts, where he could extend the perimeter of his work so as to knock down the boundaries of intervention and the fine line between commercial and pure art. Since then, his work encompasses art direction, graphic design, graphic art, type design, paintings, pastiche, collage: a wide and varied range of artistic achievements. His delusion due to the decline of creativity combined with desertion of artistry in the world of advertising, has driven him to express his talent by moving increasingly closer to the area of pure art, through a series of rather original visual works, always marked by meticulous craftsmanship, and touched by an ongoing acrobatic - yet rigorous and conscious - attempt to break with rules and conventions (“Rules and models destroy genius and art”, William Hazlitt). His projects “Auto-frames” (the frame becomes the image), Donckey (the revenge of a young moron), “Exercise of twenty-five 25s” (to explore the visual possibilities of an unexciting theme), “Happy molecules” (the unexpected sexy charm of the dichlorophene OH-CI) “Holystars” (the beatification of contemporary media icons), “Nippology” (the world’s most beautiful flag becomes the symbol of technology of the 70’s) “Sancta venustas” (the sacredness of beauty), “Semantics of the void” (a critique of the mediatic illusory language), “Upcycled words” (the imaginative reuse of lost words), maintain the creative structure that is characteristic of the “big ideas” behind the best advertising. However - as they are not subject to the approval of an investor - they are expressed with much more autonomy and freedom, as well as more bravery, flying above the heights that commercial art is usually allowed to reach. The artistic projects by Cima have had the privilege of being exhibited in Città della Pieve, Geneva, London, Milan, Novara, Riva del Garda, Rome, Todi and Venice.