Bea Scaccia

Overview

Just a dressed-up nightmare, 2024

I paint artifices. My focus has always been the act of masking, of covering up, of literally putting oneself together. From my early passion for Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, I could have guessed that my path would have gravitated around those themes. I am interested in representing our shapeshifting, dramatic, transformative selves. I’ve read about myths and fairytales, about metamorphosis and archetypes. I paint signifiers of artificial beauty, and we all know how feminine beauty can easily turn monstrous in our society. Women have been othered for centuries—in literature, visual art, and culture in general. — Bea Scaccia

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Biography

Image Credit: Toshiaki Noda

Bea Scaccia (b.1978, Veroli, Italy) earned her BA and MFA at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome where she studied with the late Italian artist Gino Marotta. In her paintings, she reworks the elements that collectively give rise to illusions of beauty and constructions of appearance, compressing them on the canvas as surreal, uncanny marks of affectation. Investigating the cultural links between feminine splendor and monstrosity, she builds pictorial compositions that can be read as true parodies of bon ton. A trained realist painter, Scaccia's method is more spontaneous rather than it is planned. She uses recurring visual tropes...