Massimo Agostinelli

Massimo Agostinelli’s artwork combines familiar cultural symbols with heightened colours and unique materials. The Italian-American, London and Zurich based artist specializes in drawing, painting and printmaking. With a background in typography and typesetting, Agostinelli works with both image and text, typically layering wordplays over images. Taking emblematic visuals from Western history, like the Mona Lisa or the moon landing of 1967, and recognizable symbols from quotidian life, like street signs, Agostinelli places these on reflective surfaces. Agostinelli’s layering technique provides a universalizing agent, as the text helps to highlight and familiarize each work as a whole. When looking at Agostinelli works, particularly his 2014 Palindrome series, viewers encounter their personal image or figure reflected through a visual idiom belonging to greater humanity. He focuses on traditional and innovative cutting-edge technologies, using a wide variety of mediums and techniques within a diverse spectrum of crafts.

Fascinated with direction and people’s instinctive reaction and absorption of information, Massimo Agostinelli’s exhibition SIGNS masterfully and playfully incorporates recognisable symbols, colours and materials to create original and culturally relevant pieces. The show includes works inspired by road signs and fabricated with custom metal and 3M High-Intensity Prismatic Reflective Vinyl Sheeting. Additionally, the two works, entitled NOW I WON, showcase the artist’s use of his own unique dichroic anodisation process through the use of oxidisation. The chemical reaction creates a blurry, almost hazy interlacing of colour change that shifts in tandem with the viewers’ movements – cohesively layering the colour, mirrors and iconic space-related images crafted in Euclidian dots.

Agostinelli graduated from Webster University whilst pursuing apprenticeships in typesetting, typography and printmaking. His work forms international art collections both private and public. Agostinelli is also a founding patron of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and Partner of Mene.