Jen Mazza

Jen Mazza: Graft
February 27 – April 12, 2014

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Jen Mazza. The exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery, and will include paintings completed over the last year. The paintings depict images of reproductions of abstract paintings, usually from old art text books and printed in black and white. She then “subverts” her images with her own interventions consisting of geometric shapes and formal compositional elements of written language including punctuation, parentheses, and asterisks. The paintings are all small to medium-sized oil paintings that employ various grays and blacks and are punctuated by bright reds and blues.

Mazza was born in 1972 in Washington D.C. She received her B.A. degree in Visual Art and Spanish Literature from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia (1994), and an M.F.A. degree in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (2001). Mazza’s paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally including a one-person show at the Jersey City Museum and her first solo show in New York at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in 2012. Significant awards include residencies at Yaddo (2005), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2004, 2005, 2006), Blue Mountain Center (2006), and the Jentel Foundation (2004, 2008). Mazza was also granted a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship to attend the Millay Colony in 2004 and returned again to the Colony in 2013. Mazza teaches at Parsons The New School of Design.