Andrea Mastrovito

Andrea Mastrovito was born in 1978 in Bergamo, Italy. He graduated from the G. Carrara Academy of Bergamo in 2001, and in 2007 he won the New York Prize, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; in 2012 the Moroso Prize; in 2016 the Ermanno Casoli Prize; in 2019 the Italian Council; in 2021 the Prix Plantagenet and the Icona Prize; and in 2022 he won the PAC, announced by the Italian Ministry of Culture. He lives and works in New York. 

 

In his artistic practice, Andrea Mastrovito uses drawing as a tool to investigate reality, twisting the visual process through the reinvention of techniques, materials, and entire environments. The main purpose of his work is to create infinite cross-references and semantic connections between opposing concepts: life/death, light/darkness, sacred/dark, and history/actuality.


Exploring drawing as copy, trace, imprint, metamorphosis, negation and performative act, Mastrovito reworks and reinterprets our time without bending to ethical or political conventions, understanding drawing as a language opposed to writing, whose origin and end it represents: a kind of direct mediator between the world of ideas and the world of reality.


Andrea Mastrovito was the first contemporary artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museo del Novecento in Milan in 2011. His works have been exhibited in major national and international museums including: the MAXXI museum, MACRO and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome; MART in Rovereto; Centro Pecci in Prato; Belvedere 21 in Vienna; MUDAC in Lausanne; MUDAM in Luxembourg; the Queens Museum, Museum of Arts and Design and The Drawing Center, New York.

 

Recent museum solo shows include Yo Lo Vi, at Proa21 in Buenos Aires (2022); Strange Days, at the Laznia Center in Gdansk (2021); I Am Not Legend, at the Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo at Palazzo Fabroni in Pistoia (2020); Very Bad Things at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (2019); Le Monde est Une Invention sans Futur at Fondation Bullukian in Lyon (2019): Symphonie cines Jahrhunderts, at Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche in Osnabruck (2018); At the end of the line, at GAMeC in Bergamo (2014).


He has also participated in several international exhibitions including: Festival Images Vevey, Biennale des arts visuels, Vevey 2020; 15th Biennale de Lyon 2019; 6th Biennale d’Anglet 2016; Le Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse 2012; 15th Quadriennale di Roma 2008. Since 2014 he has made a series of permanent public interventions in Italy, France, Belgium and the United States.


In 2017 he made his debut as a film director with the animated feature NYsferatu – Symphony of a Century, followed by the sequel, I Am Not Legend, in 2020: both were screened in various cultural realities, foundations, cinemas and festivals around the world. In 2021 he founded in Bergamo, together with partners Marcassoli and Carrera, The Drawing Hall, the first space entirely dedicated to Italian contemporary drawing, of which he is artistic director.


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Selected Works

Exhibitions



Books