NADA 2025
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NADA 2025 •
Carlo, 2021. Cardboard, plaster, aluminum, flashing, textile, resin, wood, acrylic paint, mirror, plexiglas. 12 x 8 x 16 inches.
NADA NEW YORK 2025
DRAWINGS AND SCULPTURES BY SIMONE MANTELLASSI
MAY 7-11
KIPNZ is pleased to present drawings and sculptures by Simone Mantellassi at NADA New York with additional works by Paul Latislaw and Tatana Kellner.
“Humor in the artifice is the only release for the pressure and strangeness of everyday life.”
KIPNZ is pleased to present drawings and sculptures by Simone Mantellassi at NADA New York. This will be gallery’s second presentation at NADA.
Simone Mantellassi is interested in the tragicomedy of life. Predominantly self-taught, Mantellassi is a comic savant, poking holes in the exasperations of existence as only the jester can. Untethered by genre or theory, Mantellassi is an equal opportunity collector. Like a bird collecting bits and pieces for a nest, ideas, jokes, references, shiny objects and refuse from the day amass into brilliantly timed drawings and three-dimensional sculptures. The ultimate anti-hero, Mantellassi’s works absorb the absurdities and anxieties of life and release them as laughter.
A self-taught artist, born and raised in Florence, Italy (1971), Mantellassi moved to the United States in 2002 and lives and works in Gilbertsville, New York, in the Western Catskills. He began drawing at an early age. Inspired by comic books of the 1970s, he created his own. Self-effacing from the beginning, his first comic “Il Muro” (The Wall) was about a hero who always dies without reaching his goal. Surrounded and inspired by the Renaissance art of his hometown, Florence—with its heroic humanism, free of irony or humor—he practiced his own drawing, incorporating the absurdity of everyday life into his figurations.
Composition of Abandoned Treehouses on Dead Trees and Bakery Goods, 2025. Acrylic on paper. 40 x 29 inches.
Inspired by filmmakers and artists such as David Lynch, Georg Baselitz, Alejandro Jorodowsky, Josephine Halvorson, Salman Toor and Philip Guston, Mantellassi works in an aesthetic fully his own; mixing comic book storytelling, surrealism and formalism into a distinct visual language. Echoing the multi-perspective quality of comic book pages and surrealist art in his drawings, overlapping storylines and viewpoints cohabitate in one plane. Nonsensical alignments of objects and narratives intermingle with a humorous, dreamy palette of color, often paired with poetically off-kilter titles in his second language, English. Pastries (real and fake), trees, pipes, body parts, treehouses, scenes from the kitchen, shoes and trash from the woods all expand and contract between resolution and dissolution, animating a dreamlike quality where highly vivid thoughts remain incomplete and half-formed. Mantellassi is drawn toward this “half-formed” state of being, taking delight in the humor of pathos. “The downcast and the pathetic interests me very much for its human feeling of being sad and funny at the same time.”
Assoazione Generale Of Limited Relief, 2022. Paper mache, fabric, clay, collage, wire, acrylic paint, wood, plexiglas. 19 x 13 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches.
From certain drawings, Mantellassi creates three-dimensional sculptures—compact, diorama-like compositions composed of everyday materials in plexiglas casing. The humor and irony of his work is made concretely manifest in these objects, whose crumply, crude surfaces and “imperfect” finishes are precisely where the work culminates most fully; stage-sets for the tragicomedy of life where narrative and its artifice are on display at the same time. “As a stage set, from the audience you see something—the artifice works. But from backstage you see how everything is propped up, and just barely. Like kids putting on a show. I like seeing both perspectives at the same time. With the sculptures, it is like the drawings open up and I can see behind them and see what is holding them together.” For Mantellassi, this unfiltered humor in the artifice—life as a threadbare stageset—is the best release for the strangeness of everyday life. By delighting in the absurd, much like a sage piddling in the garden, Mantellassi conjures and jests the philosophical, while sweeping the wings for the next show.
Carlo, 2021.
The 3 Stages Of A Sage, 2025.
Breakfast of Champions, 2023.
The Status Of Things As They Have Been, 2022
Assoazione Generale Of Limited Relief, 2022
Selected Works on Paper:
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Fake Cakes and Doilies in the 4th Dimension
2025. Acrylic on paper. 30 x 23 inches.
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Studio SetUp With Floating Piece
2025. Acrylic on paper. 32 × 25 inches.
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Scary Peoples (molded lunch) SetUp
2024. Colored pencil and acrylic on paper. 15 × 12 inches.
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Construction With Skeletor, Jonhny Maturo, a Hammer and a Sandwich Board, In Space
2025. Colored pencil and acrylic on paper. 12 × 9 inches.
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Soundscape With Water
2024. Acrylic on paper. 40 x 29 inches.
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Treehouse
2025. Colored pencil and acrylic on paper. 12 × 9 inches.
Additional Works by Paul Latislaw and Tatana Kellner:
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Chasing Rabbits
Paul Latislaw. 2025. Felted wool. 28 × 28 × 10 inches. Learn more.
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Stumble
Tatana Kellner. 2023. Acrylic on canvas. 73 × 49 inches. Learn more.
For inquiries, please contact KIPNZ.