Alexandra MAS
BIO
Born in Transylvania from an emigrant noble Russian family, Alexandra Mas emerged into the arts when only an infant. At 14 years old she began her formal art education, and meets the famous engraver Marcel Chirnoaga, who mentored her for a number of years. She starts already to show her work in national and international shows and to do art direction at QTRaz Studio. Alexandra attended UNAB (the National University of Art, Bucharest), Professor Mihai Manescu. The Modern Art and Design School, Paris graduated in 2003. She continues to show her art and her work led to a number of commercial opportunities , including Christian Dior, the Louvre Museum and Marsu Productions. From 2006 to 2009 she left for California, where she did commercial art direction while teaching and directing a talent school in Beverly Hills. She comes back to France in 2009 and dedicates her-self entirely to her artwork. Her inspiration comes from collective memory, sensitive social subjects like ecology, consumerism, women’s image or inner questioning. Her intellectual path takes us to an eclectic universe full of sensorial complexity. The pictographies and performances bring together painting, digital art, photography, writing, acting and sound creation. Her works have been presented from Bucharest to Paris, Bordeaux, New York, Miami and Saint Petersburg. In 2020 she initiates Shim Eco with Shim Art Network, a group of likeminded artists and thinkers already invited on Artsy and at the URSA gallery, in the US.
Art & Design
EDGE Art Director
Alexandra Mas
Univers
“Artist fetishizing the human body (and fist of all, women’s body) with all the representations, Alexandra Mas defines herself as a beauty addict. But pay attention: this, in our corrupted world, subject to all kinds of manipulations – especially those of the body appearance – it does not exists, it remains a fleeing, inextinguishable fantasy. Seize the beauty? Unfortunately, nothing will be as expected, the real endlessly collapses on itself. The vanity thematic has a reason to take a certain place in her paintings, pictographies or artist’s performances, obvious or rampant it takes a permanent place. It is told: we are the first victims of our consented servitude to this illusion”.
Paul ARDENNE, author, curator
“Today it is such an easy thing to recreate fantasy into images thanks to digital work, to “retouch” manipulations. But to induce a dream-like state is farm ore complicated. Alexandra Mas is one of these rare being capable to make dreams come alive. She is sharing an oneiric universe full of poetry and real talented technics. Through her compositions she manages to take us away into her world, at the gates of a new reality”
Jean DEULCEUX, lecturer and art critic
“I discovered Alexandra Mas’ works in 2013, when I was curating the International Contemporaneous Art Contest, GemlucArt, in Monaco (…) Our relation continued and I was getting deeper into her protean work traveling towards figurative painting confines, lyrical abstraction, pictographs, art to wear. Alexandra Mas is constantly exploring new territories. But where comes her inspiration from, what was driving her? We had regular discussions on subject we were both passionate of. The “beauty” in the contemporaneous art and Alexandra’s topic on Magnifisme made an echo toward my editorial work. “Art in a constant road between our souls and our lives”, was saying the artist is the fundament text of the movement.” But what answered to a social problem was her work about the women’s place in our mutating civilisation. Since 4 years the artist spirit was sprouting her Preconceived art show. In this 12 pictographs, the artist is using her own body and creates powerful self-portraits where she plays different archetypes of today’s women, fragmented, dismembered between her different roles. In order to incarnate these 12 stereotypes, the artist interviewed lots of women of different horizons, carers, and ages. The Preconceived art show is a social manifest revealing the universal aspect of the intimate feminine experience and the weight of these stigmas brought upon today’s women. She might be free and independent but still subject to prejudice, women’s spirit is fitting to find it’s rightful place in a society structured by the cultural weight of the millenary male authority (…) in one of the first images that I could see, the artist is offering her bleeding heart, a heart ripped out of her chest, in a total exposure. First emotionally intense image of a series (…) from the work of this Slavic origin artist, that I salute the engagement. Alexandra Mas is creating herself, using her sole as shapeable glaze, her own work of art, in a certain way…” Valérie PENVEN, author, curator and journalist
