ANDREA STANISLAV: Surmatants – Mars Rising

Bruno David is pleased to present Surmatants – Mars Rising, a video work by New York-based artist Andréa Stanislav. This is Stanislav third solo exhibition with the gallery.

On view at Bruno David Gallery’s New Media Room is the artist’s elegiacally visceral response to the COVID-19 pandemic – converging Pittsburgh’s Slavic immigrant labor history and 13th century plague informants. Tenants of Russian Cosmism and transcendence are evoked through Jesse Gelaznik’s musical compositions, paired with dances by John Harbist and renowned choreographer Zeljko Jergan and performed by the Tamburitzans. Surmatants – Mars Rising was first shown in 2021 at The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburg, as part of her solo exhibition “Surmatants – Mars Rising.”

Her hybrid practice spans sculpture, video, immersive multimedia installation, and public art. Stanislav’s work is anchored in a collision of beauty and horror — dualities that intimate sublimity, through equations of site + scale. Andréa’s work often excavates constructs and devolution of civilizations and empires —merging the past and present, while proposing questions of the future. In the Duchampian sense, the viewer becomes a participant who completes the work. Stanislav’s installations erode the boundary between subject and object in a literal “physicality of ideas” — manifested experientially through an immersive experience.