A Faust(o)ian Bargain

Galleria Mazzoli is pleased to announce the opening of the group exhibition "A Faust(o)ian Bargain." Nine young American artists offer a look at post-digital revolution society. The authors, most of whom live in the same district of New York—hence the ironic reference in the title to Fausto, the neighborhood's barber so popular among artists, as well as to Goethe's character—offer a new point of view from which to look at the changes that are characterizing large urban centers and that reflect new social and economic dynamics. Using a variety of techniques, the artists present works that reclaim the analog, as opposed to the digital, essence of experience. Rubble from neighborhoods razed to the ground—once mainly by catastrophic events, now by the hand of man—urban and industrial waste, objects discarded because no longer fashionable, are some of the recurring motives in the works on display. As Alexander Shulan writes in the catalog's text: "Produced in dialogue with the proliferation of often simultaneously opulent and anodyne urban environments, their work reflects a city in an identity conflict with itself. Through their use of discarded or low materials, ones often taken from the street, or ones worked by the artist’s own hand, and in their adoption of outmoded and dead technologies, they resist larger conventional mantras of the benevolence of technological progress."

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a catalog with text by Alexander Shulan.