Alessandra was born in Friuli in northern Italy in 1968, but spent most of her formative years in Venice, in the company of a vibrant international artistic community. Alessandra graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in the USA in 1991 with a BA in Fine Arts. During her time in America, she also worked with established artists such as Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and Rodney Allen Greenblatt under the Arts Education program at AICA in New York.
She returned to Venice in 1992 and began her career as an artist in the city’s abandoned palazzos, doing site specific installations drawing on the textures of the multi-layered Venetian architecture. She moved on to painting in studio, and set up a collective called Aqualta with English, German, French, Spanish and other Italian artists. Although working in different media, including jewellery and photography, the group drew on each other’s experiences and influences, to present a series of combined shows in their native countries, including Paris and London.
An installation at the Querini Stampaglia in Venice entitled Livelli in Input saw her collaborate with English artist Craig Wood to create a large computer- manipulated image printed on PVC (8m x4m) exploring the loss of pictorial definition at scale with the loss of Venice’s culture to a newer, more vicarious state that claims to uphold it.
Her debut in Australia was at Gadfly Gallery, which showed a selection of monoprints. Alessandra was invited to move to Perth to work on paintings and sculpture for the 1998 Festival of Perth, including an extended residence at Claremont School of Art.
Since then she has held many solo and group exhibitions at Greenhill Galleries, Gallows Gallery, PICA, Art Gallery of Western Australia , Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery and for Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe and Bondi NSW.
In 2011 she was the recipient for the Helen Lempriere Scholarship for sculpture which facilitated a residency and an exhibition at the SVA of New York in 2012. In 2018 recipient for the Transfield Australian Invited Artist Bondi NSW and in 2019 SXS Bondi invited artist for sculpture inside. She has since created a major Public Art work for the Innerwest Council in Sydney,NSW
Alessandra work has often explored the relationship between what is visible and what is invisible, what is superficial, on the surface and what is inside, deeper, hidden. She successfully conjures an ambiguous environment, one where presence is virtual, where people exist in the memory of place.
Her work lies between narrative and abstraction, responding to her instinct, her discernment with space and time, as an expression of her moods and thoughts. Time is essential in her work, as the development of a theme unfolds with the working out of thoughts and emotions on canvas, helping her to comprehend that which eludes her.
Alessandra sees fragments of a larger dialogue in her paintings, aspects of a more complex existence, and through them seeks to articulate the intangible, to take the viewer to places they might not necessarily go on their own, somewhere between fantasy and reality, between actual and fiction.
In her installations she has often used earth, grass, water and other natural materials to surprise and challenge pre-conceived ideas of inside and outside, prompting us to think about our perceptions when we’re on different soils.
Her most recent works incorporates 3D printing to express links between nature and technology, creating 3dWorks in stainless steel and handrolled glass
From the outside in terms of relationship and feeling, sculpture has become another means of expressing the work that she continues to explore in her paintings, playing with the imagination, looking for what is beneath, inside, hidden.
