ARTIST STATEMENT
Brighton Based Visual Artist and Printmaker Moatzart
PRINTMAKING
I am Alexandra Motiu and I make art under the pseudonym Moatzart. My practice is interdisciplinary however recently, I have been solely focusing on printmaking.
My work has pop art and surrealist art humour with an old masters' feel. My background is painting and printmaking. I am influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, and my work is revelatory of internal struggles through disturbing imagery, as the grotesque and carnivalesque is endlessly fascinating. I aim to make hauntingly beautiful work that will stay with the viewer for a long time. I love stories, myth and folklore, and a lot of my work is very illustrative.
I make limited edition linocut prints, as well as drypoint etchings and monotypes using a printing press. I am currently starting to work with wood engravings as well.
COLLAGE AND INSTALLATION
A collage practice followed, as I started using found materials and images, and looked to Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, The Chapman Brothers, Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst, and publications like Toilet Paper Magazine.
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At Brighton university, I became focused on deskilling and appropriation art, and started working with found objects. One of my biggest projects was The Toy, where I found the original toy that Damien Hirst modelled “Hymn” after, and reaffirmed it as a toy, by presenting the various ways it could be played with, like a reciprocal ready made (using a Rembrandt as an ironing board).
RELATIONAL AND SOCIALLY ENGAGED WORK
My practice was becoming participatory, as I became interested in Heideggerian ideas about the subject and object, and I was encouraging the public to interact with my work either by stealing it or through becoming part of it.
Lastly, I have moved into the terrain of relational art, and have developed “anti-relational” works, where I work with the public to the completion of the work, but present it in a way which goes against the relational aesthetics tradition. I aim to work more and more with the public, to the production of final objects, for the contemplation of a second viewer (Claire BIshop). I would like for my practice to become more and more socially engaged as it matures, and for my background in fields like painting and printmaking to help in their aestheticization, in the way of socially engaged projects which have an aesthetic and symbolic result, such as the practices of Renzo Martens, Michelangelo Pistoletto, or Serge Attukwei Clottey.
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Portfolio:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:f0c8ee88-4465-3246-a7fc-e3bb5b0762da