“Pop Surrealism presents itself as art pulsating with life, whose pop icons perfectly reflect the controversies of the historical and cultural reality in which we live. It mocks this reality with sharp yet sophisticated irony, a wise sarcasm that suddenly reveals a new awareness, the existence of the surreal.

Here, Pop Surrealism becomes an exact projection of the unconscious and its adventures. This explains the constant fairy-tale presence in the works of such artists, where childhood, personified through recurring childlike figures, becomes a metaphor for the pure and innocent soul, the only one capable of glimpsing the dreamlike universe of the unconscious, where nothing is absurd and the surreal materializes.

Simultaneously, the grotesque of the paradoxical compositions makes the atmosphere vague and no longer safe, due to an unknown hiding behind the trunks of enchanted forests, reflecting the same imperceptibility of the human subconscious. As is often the case with major cultural avant-gardes, which arise boldly to oppose what has become tradition, Pop Surrealism is born to regenerate a forgotten figurativeness through new interpretative canons, giving shape to an artistic current in its own right.

Having faced initial official criticism, followed by a constant process of expansion and development that has now involved the fields of design, fashion, and photography, the new Surrealism has become an integral part of contemporary art. This is thanks to its major icons, such as Joe Sorren, Marion Peck, and Mark Ryden, whose huge-format oil paintings are exhibited in prestigious international museums and collected by renowned collectors and Celebrities…”

(Alexandra Mazzanti 2010)

Since 2007, Alexandra has curated hundreds of solo and group exhibitions with artists from around the world, primarily for her DCG in Rome (est. 2007) and London (est. 2017), as well as several significant institutional and museum projects. She has worked with the most renowned icons of Street Art and the Pop Surrealist movement, significantly contributing to bringing them to the attention of the contemporary European art world and highlighting extraordinary new talents in contemporary international art. Among her institutional projects: “Spray for Your Rights,” “Cross The Streets,” “Color for Action,” “Pop New Pop” at MACRO in Rome, “Pop Surrealism, What a WanderFool World” at the Carandente Museum, “Troubles With Angels,” a Ray Caesar retrospective at Palazzo Saluzzo, and “Lacrima Aquarium” at the Casa dell’Architettura Acquario Romano.

“Let’s begin from the name. Dorothy, like the main character of the Wizard of Oz: an imaginary creature indeed, but not like the absent-minded Alice. Another detail: the red shoes that not only have superpowers, they wink on stage. Let’s get down to the circus: an idea of choral show, between the clownish and the tight-rope walker. The common element is the marvel that joins art, music, theatre and entertainment. And now astonishment becomes a sort of research; hunger to reach beyond, to find the image that catapults you in realm of dreams. Extraordinary or multi-sensory trips, enclosed in a hyper stratified artwork, or dispersed in the environment.

It is with audacity that in 2007, Alexandra Mazzanti’s gallery lands in the Pigneto district of Rome, an old peasant area on the outskirts of the city, dear to Pasolini and gentrified by the new occupiers (artists, intellectuals, VIP fauna). The area of the gallery is on the ground floor of a small villa; two large rooms with fiery red walls and an external courtyard. Since its first inauguration it became instantly clear that Dorothy is not just any art gallery, the public is welcomed by a contortionist in a shop window. But the idea is not to shock, to enhance the container to sweeten the enclosed. The show is intrinsic to the idea of art as an immersive experience. And the vernissage is a small masterpiece in itself, playing the surprise card. It reminds me of the historical Parisian exhibition “Le Vide” by Yves Klein at the Iris Clert gallery in 1958, with its monochrome white walls and blue cocktails being served to visitors.

Seventy years later at the Dorothy gallery you can sense the same feeling of being at the forefront, in a Pop Surrealism key. The new climate – melting pot if techniques, contemporary iconography, computer graphics, underground style and erudite citations – is one of the new “isms” of the Naughties. And Alexandra Mazzanti, adventurous like her fairy tale alter-ego, is already searching for the Witch of the West; not to defeat her, but rather to adopt her. Dorothy is to Pop Surrealism what The Factory was for Pop Art: a family. Without matriarchal diktats or the whims of a career woman, it is not unusual that after an exhibition you find yourself in the lounge of Alexandra Mazzanti’s museum-house, between toys and vinyls, sculptures by Kathie Olivas and Amanda’s dog attempting to steal a mouthful from the table.

Dinners chez Mazzanti, like the vernissage, are always different: from sushi to last minute recipes made out of fridge leftovers, from macaroons to the capital’s most famous tiramisu. All done without formality, the only ingredient that is never missing is a merry company. This is the reason why Art and Life are continuously blurring into one, from the pressroom to the living room, from foreign trips to uncover new talents to the tireless web searches.

The alchemy comes out of a blend of fantasy and substance, of creative flair and entrepreneurial nose. And the secret is the passion, an adventure after the other. It’s from this desire to change that the decision to relocate to the centre was born. To the new base in Via dei Pettinari, between Campo de’ Fiori and Ponte Sisto. Which is of course a strategic location, but the logic is not just business oriented. In the meantime, Dorothy has grown. You can see it from her creations, her children Gelsomina and Romeo (Alexandra is always surrounded by an aura of rarified and pre-Raphaelite beauty, so that it’s difficult to guess how old she is): at the beginning they were two tiny little things, now they have become a sensitive preadolescent girl and a quick-witted boy.

They are two pieces of artwork in flesh and bone that do not disdain being depicted near their mother like the main characters of a familiar novel, in which homework and football matches are laced with instalments and inaugurations. If it’s true that the art dealer lives in symbiosis with the rest of the world, it is also true that she manages to cut herself out sometimes on her own. That’s when you see her in front of her computer, captured by the latest “genius” uncovered online. Or absorbed into planning her next event, strong-willed and dreamy… Then she wakes up and you can hear her shout: “Gelso, Romeo, food is ready!”.”

(About Alexandra Mazzanti by M. E. Fiaschetti)