Nicole (Nico) Mazza works with fabrics, embroidery, sewing and hand-dyeing, using religious references, telenovela stereotypes and pop culture, contrasting the delicacy of embroidery, mostly related to a feminine tradition, with explicitly sexualised imagery. She is particularly interested in the iconography of women seen through the lens of socially constructed fantasies; as she explains it, ‘the constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed woman’.

Mazza grew up in Gainesville, Florida. She graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, where she studied painting and textile arts. In 2015 she founded She/Folk, a feminist art collective focused on curatorial projects and publications, showcasing works by female or female-gender-identified artists. After completing a residency at Fundación ACE in Buenos Aires in 2014, Nicole moved to Argentina to focus on her art and her other love, tango.

As a first-generation Portuguese immigrant, Nicole learned the traditions of weaving, sewing and embroidery from her maternal grandmother. She views sewing as an act of repairing something that has been broken. The figures are often twisted – bodies in positions of discomfort and impossibility, limbs intertwined, wrapped around each other, reaching out, desiring. They sometimes show acts of cannibalism, illustrating how society consumes women. She interweaves the delicate and the grotesque with an erotic veil, representing the ruptures and fissures in the social fabric.

Nicole Mazza now lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has exhibited her works in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba, Santiago de Chile, Punta del Este, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Gainesville. Notable recent solo exhibitions include Blandir el Quiebre (Forcing the Break) at CRUDO in Rosario in 2022, and Canto del Cisne (Swan Song) at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires and El Deseo de no Querer (The Desire Not to Want) at Quimera Galería, also in Buenos Aires.

Nicole Mazza’s website can be found here.