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American artist living in Spain making colorful paper sculptures from accordion books
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Nicole Pietrantoni (b. 1981, USA) is an artist best known for her colorful paper sculptures made from printed accordion books. Her work combines traditional printmaking and bookbinding techniques with painting, photography, and sculpture. Her artwork moves fluidly between digital and analog modes of making. Pietrantoni explores the materials of print media and, at the same time, critiques these traditions and the ways that printed matter produces desire.
Pietrantoni is the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright to Iceland, an Artist Trust Fellowship, a Leifur Eiriksson Foundation Grant, and the Manifest Prize. Pietrantoni has been awarded artist residencies at Meta Open Arts, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and La Maldita Estampa in Barcelona, Spain, amongst others.
Pietrantoni has been a visiting artist and lecturer at over 40 institutions and her work has been exhibited in over 100 national and international exhibitions, including solo shows at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art (San Juan Island, WA) and the Manifest Gallery (Cincinatti, OH). Group venues include exhibitions at Galerie Gardette (curated by The Curators, Paris, France), Galleri Heike Arndt (Berlin, Germany), The Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize Shortlist Exhibition (London, UK), Lia Libro de Artista (Guadalajara, Mexico), the San Francisco Center for the Book (San Francisco, CA), and American University Museum (Washington, DC). Pietrantoni’s art has been included in publications including Art in Print, The Washington Post, and featured in the book American Printmakers (Schiffer Publishing). Pietrantoni’s artwork is in collections such as Yale University, the Library of Congress, Washington State Arts Commission, Meta, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, amongst others.
Pietrantoni received her MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and her BS in Human and Organizational Development and Art History from Vanderbilt University. She is represented in the US by Long Sharp Gallery and currently lives in Girona, Spain.
I create inkjet-printed accordion books that expand into wall-mounted paper sculptures. Strips of printed paper zig-zag down the wall in grids, revealing fragments of an abstracted landscape that hang like scrolls of color and halftone dots. When collapsed, the accordion books fit modestly in the hand, but when expanded, they are riotous – fluorescent orange bathes the wall, flowers burst into view, pixels dissolve and resolve.
Taking an experimental approach to the book form, my art asks how the book and printedmatter can both enable and undercut humans’ active role in constructing and idealizing images. My work celebrates the traditions and materials of print media and, at the same time, undermines those traditions by drawing attention to the that way prints shape our desires and how we experience the world.
Digital photographs become a sculptural, physical space in the accordion book form. By printing with exaggerated colors and CMYK halftone dot patterns, I draw attention to the production of the printed image, exploring how we frame and consume images of our landscape, from grand vistas to the everyday landscapes of our domestic spaces. I manipulate snapshots of exotic vistas, weeds in a sidewalk, and flowers on a kitchen table.
I use the camera to reframe the histories of landscape photography and the still life genre. I am both excited and alarmed by how cameras, screens, and swipes are changing the way I see. Details such as the printed marks, the folds, and the shadows on the wall point to an image that is at once beautiful and also fractured and highly constructed.
The printed accordion books become analog artifacts - objects that make my pixel-based world become reconstituted within the material world. I weave together what feels like a fragmented way of seeing the world into something cohesive again.
Meta Open Arts Residency and Site-Specific Installation
RARO Residency, Barcelona, Spain
Fulbright Grant to Iceland
Over 100 national and international exhibitions
Represented by Long Sharp Gallery
Portfolio
Artworks created by Nicole Pietrantoni. A collection of handbound accordion books and bent steel sculptures. Archival prints on Japanese papers. Available for custom installations and site-specific projects.
Contact Info
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Emailnicole.pietrantoni@gmail.com
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Phone676645194
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Websitehttps://www.nicole-pietrantoni.com/
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