Bio

Owen Mastroianni is a painter, sculptor, and drag artist based in Chicago, IL. He holds a BFASA degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is actively developing his artistic career. His current focus includes expanding a body of work that explores themes of impermanence, memory, dream states, and industrialization, while also continuing to hone skills in carpentry.

Artist Statement

I strive to make work that outlives my body. My name is Owen Geno Mastroianni, and I was born in 2003 in Chicago, Illinois, where I’m currently based. I primarily work in both oil and acrylic painting, as well as ceramics.

While I move fluidly across subjects and media, much of my current work focuses on in-between spaces. I’m drawn to the quiet details of contemporary urban life: the unglamorous, the decaying, and the transitional. Through themes of fear, impermanence, corporeality, and queerness, I explore what it means to exist in a body and in a world that’s shifting too quickly to process.

I often incorporate invented symbols as a way to communicate what I cannot describe. My practice is an act of preservation — a way of holding onto fleeting things and making them speak.