Alessandra Mancini on Painting, Design, and the Eroticism of Objects

Alessandra Mancini, born in Campobasso in 1972, studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and now lives and works in Milan as an artist and graphic designer in contemporary art publishing. Her last solo show, Matchy-Matchy, was held at Caffè Internazionale in Palermo in 2017. Group exhibitions include Festival del Paesaggio in Anacapri (2018), Les armes silencieuses at Centre d’Art Bastille in Grenoble (2011), Prague Biennale 4 (2009), Gennariello at Balice Hertling in Paris (2009), and Calling all the stations at Galleria Nazionale in Pristina (2009). Mancini's early work featured human figures in ambiguous, enigmatic situations, often trapped in geometric grids. She later removed the figure in favor of 'humanized' objects, exploring the symbolic force of design icons. Her series Matchy-Matchy (2017) includes works like Divano osceno, an Ikea sofa depicted as low-cost pornography, while other paintings in the series are erotic stories of passion and scandal. The Shape of you series consists of hypothetical female portraits inspired by an ashtray from her childhood home. Mancini also works in video and animation, such as Agoraphobia, a short animated film. She does not have a studio, preferring to work at home in intense bursts. She believes irony is essential to art, otherwise it becomes rhetoric. Mancini sees the current Italian painting scene as liberating for young artists, though critical foundations are lacking after years of rejection.