Alessandro Pessoli. New Work

This fall, Italian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Alessandro Pessoli will debut his latest body of work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in his first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast. On view September 28, 2012, through February 10, 2013, New Work: Alessandro Pessoli highlights the artist's diverse range of art making since relocating from Milan to the United States in 2009, bringing together 40 recent graphite drawings and a selection of works on paper and ceramic sculptures. Together, these pieces reveal an imaginative, organic meditation on Modernism, mythology, childhood, and the artistic persona.

The exhibition is organized by Jenny Gheith, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, and marks the latest installment of the museum's ongoing New Work series, which continues to feature the most innovative expressions of contemporary art.

Alessandro Pessoli's (b. 1963) drawings, paintings, and sculptures place expressive, often melancholy figures in indeterminate spaces and dreamlike narratives. By turns cynical, sincere, or absurd, his fictional constructions engage a recurring cast of characters and symbols such as musicians, a candle with a flame, a guitar, a phallus, and a cross. These stock figures and forms function as the artist's personal commedia dell'arte, which he continually reimagines and recreates.

Alessandro Pessoli
New Work
Kuratorin: Jenny Gheith