Andrea Mastrovito
Andrea Mastrovito was born in 1978 in Bergamo, Italy. He received his M.F.A. in 2001 from Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti in Bergamo. He lives and works in New York.
In the early 2000s, Mastrovito became known primarily for his collages on canvas, in which he overlapped hundreds of layers of cut-out and painted silhouettes. In 2009, he produced his first Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino, in which the concepts of assemblage and collage took on a markedly spatial quality. This series set the stage for subsequent work, such as The Island of Dr. Mastrovito. The work encompasses thousands of pages from volumes of zoology and botany books, cut out and displayed three-dimensionally, like in a pop-up book. The works cascaded off the walls, organically filling the exhibition space and eliminating the distance between the viewer and the works of art.
In the following years, Mastrovito’s work became increasingly diverse. Entire environments or events, i.e. galleries, libraries, apartments, concerts, movies and soccer stadiums are incorporated into Mastrovito’s oeuvre. Examples include the coordination of a 2000-square-foot painting that was held up by hundreds of Italian football fans from Atalanta B.C, or his project Kickstarting, wherein he worked with 100 kids in Brooklyn to create a 1,000-foot mural. In 2017, Mastrovito released his film NYsferatu, a hand-animated and redrawn rendition of Friedrich W. Murnau’s seminal 1922 film Nosferatu, restaged in N.Y.C.
The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs awarded Mastrovito the New York Prize in 2007 and the Moroso Prize in 2012. In 2011, he became the first artist to have a solo show at Museo del Novecento in Milan. His works have been included in many institutional exhibitions all across Europe and the United States, such as those at MAXXI National Museum of the 21st century (Rome, Italy), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome, Italy), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, Italy), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (Italy), Manchester Art Gallery (UK), B.P.S. 22 (Charleroi, Belgium) and M.A.D. (New York, USA). He has held public talks at Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Naba, Accademia di Brera, Museo Pecci and Spazio Oberdan in Milan, Palazzo Forti in Verona, American Academy in Rome, Museum Nitsch in Naples, Pavillon Blanc in Colomiers, Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, ISCP and Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Musei Civici di Pistoia (Italy), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome, Italy), Fondation Bullukian (Lyon, France), Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche (Osnabrück, Germany) and Art Bärtschi & Cie, now Wilde (Geneva, Switzerland).
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Colson, 2021
Carved blackboard
134 x 161 cm

Léthé, 2021
Carved blackboard
134 x 161 cm

Columbus, 2021
Carved blackboard
134 x 161 cm

Dialogue avec la femme, p. II, 2017
Pencil on rulers, lightbox
70 x 40 x 8 cm

Il Lungo Addio, 2020
Lithographic pencil on rulers, lightbox
190 x 180 x 10 cm

Andrea s’è perso, 2020
Lithographic pencil on rulers, lightbox
210 x 100 x 10 cm

Le monde est une invention sans futur IV, 2019
Wooden inlay and collage
305 x 205 cm

Le monde est une invention sans futur VI, 2019
Wooden inlay and collage
305 x 245 cm

Le monde est une invention sans futur IV, 2019
Wooden inlay and collage
305 x 205 cm