Beyond the Line

Beyond the Line
by
Alex White Mazzarella & Giuseppe Andriani
January 14 - January 31, 2010
Chashama Gallery

Chashama is pleased to announce the upcoming two person exhibition which presents Brooklyn-based artist Alex White Mazzarella (Mazza) and his renowned great grandfather Italian artist Giuseppe Andriani. The show is named “Beyond the Line” which not only exhibits the art works from two different centuries but also celebrate the artistic blood passed down between generations. In the “Beyond the Line”, Mazza will reveal his paintings from the recent body of work “Remixing Media to Remix Reality” alongside a retrospective of his great grandfather Andriani.
Building upon today’s street art and the neo-expressionism of the 80’s, Mazza’s mixed media paintings are fun yet provocative commentaries and assertions on todays’ age and culture. They are abstract spontaneous explosions of color and line that mix illustration with painting. In the 8 foot “Becoming Bubble Gum”, a seemingly punk baby morphed into an Alice in Wonderland type creature comes at the viewer along with an iconic language and provocative script. By mixing texture, photograph, paint and charcoal, Mazza creates his imagery amidst raw and alive surfaces that look to communicate the life embedded in city walls and surfaces.
Giuseppe Andriani, who was born in Lecce (Puglia) in 1864 and died in Florence in 1948, dedicated his entire life to art. Influenced by Antonio Piccini, a famous engraver of 1800 in Italy, his repertoire of drawings, acqueforti (etchings), punte secche (dry point etchings) oil paintings and watercolors depicted scenes of his everyday life and surroundings. His sketches of the original Florence bridges which are destroyed by WW II bring back to life Ponte alla Carraia, Ponte Scandicci, Ponte Santa Trinita and Ponte alla Vittoria. Rome’s Fine Arts Academy, the Society of Fine Arts and the International Black and White Expo…etc have honored Andriani’s works.

“Beyond the Line” is curated by Taiwanese and New York based curator NuNu Hung