Tony Bartolucci

Tony Bartolucci draws inspiration from the wry humor, subtle absurdities, and uncanny coincidences woven into everyday life. In his works reflecting this he constructs stylized scenes set in vague, unreal worlds, often centered around cheeky, off-kilter characters. His whimsical narratives are often laced with irreverence and irony, and blur the line between reality and myth.

I draw inspiration from the wry humor, subtle absurdities, and uncanny coincidences woven into everyday life. In my paintings and drawings I translate these fleeting moments into stylized and surrealistic scenes set in vague, unreal worlds, and often centered around slightly off-kilter figures. I construct whimsical narratives, usually laced with a thread of irony, that blur the line between reality and myth. Many of these images are visual manifestations of moods, emotions and states of being. Generally representational, my work veers toward abstraction, recurrently making use of geometric shapes and patterns, symmetry, compressed compositions and conspicuously repeated forms. These are influenced by my observation of nature, man-made objects, architecture and textiles, and the interesting places these disparate inspirations intersect. Born in a Cleveland suburb in 1980, I grew up amid the campus of a small liberal arts college, near a defunct quarry. Gently encouraged to carry the torch of a close knit family of artists, designers and historians, I received a Bachelor of Science in Design in 2003 from The Ohio State University's Department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design. Here I was deeply influenced by Bauhaus, the Swiss school and Mid-century modernism. After nearly two decades working as a graphic designer, art director and creative director for internationally recognized agencies and studios in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam, I eventually began to crave the physicality and solitary expression of painting and drawing, and over the past decade I have transitioned into the full-time pursuit of these passions. I report for duty daily at my studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.