Valeria Grinfan Toderini was born in Venice.
After receiving her degree in Foreign Literatures and Languages at the Venetian University of Ca’ Foscari in 1973, she pursued her artistic interests both as a painter, a poet and a playwright.

“In the early Nineties she developed a technique which allowed her to set old Venetian glass beads and murrhines in an acrylic-painted and quite colourful background…
That way her Glasstakes were born, metaphorical shots or takes of a script told through chromatic valences made glossy by fragments of old glass… Symbolic presences, both refined and fragile set in a pictorial space which doesn’t acknowledge any border. Because of the chromatic and material rebellion that runs through her work, Valeria Grinfan Toderini’s artistic voice stands out as a strong denunciation of the extremely frail borderline conditions that beset the town that gave her her origin, both culturally and genetically. Venice, already immersed in watery abysses agrees to her own metamorphosis into a coralline atoll and, though broken and insulted, she can still project and expand tone-deep phantasmagories and colouring of light, since light is her very essence”.
Enzo Dall’Ara, il Corriere, Romagna, 1999.

She was a close friend of Annette Rowdon, the London sculptor, who in her turn had been a friend, and for a time a pupil, of Henry Moore. Throughout  the Eighties and till the time of Annette Rowdon’s death in 1996, she was often in her studio both in London and in Tuscany, Italy, investigating various possibilities of visual expressions.

“In her work Venice and North Europe coexist… to summarize her art is a delicate musical composition concealing an aching wound. Her sensitivity refuses any restriction. Each moment of her art is lived with generosity on the borderline between a vast intelligence and an overflowing heart, combined in order to find a balance.
This is how Grinfan Toderini’s work comes into being: in her wall paintings 18th/19th Century frames are ‘contaminated’ with modern acrylic and synthetic resins. Here ‘ambitious’ representations are charged to the very limit, even overcharged, with a luminous chromatic material, caught in the knot of the silken  scarf which Othello used to strangle Desdemona”.
Gian Ruggero Manzoni, L’esaltazione consapevole del Pernicieux Saveur, Edizioni del Girasole, Ravenna,1999.

In the Eighties and Nineties the artist has also followed Bruno Vianello’s art decorating and restoring work in his Venetian workshop.

“An artist through and through, Valeria is faithful to a tradition that sees that which is literary, visual, musical, crafted, philosophical… united in a single individual… relying on the exaltation of beauty, of ‘simplicity’ raised to the status of iconic sumptuousness”.
Gian Ruggero Manzoni, L’esaltazione consapevole del Pernicieux Saveur, Edizioni del Girasole, Ravenna, 1999.