About the artist:

Andrew Castrucci was born in 1961 and raised in the proximity of West Hoboken to Cliffside, including the environs of the New Jersey industrial expanses of the lower Hudson River. Since 1984 he has been living and working in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Shown in this website are four main bodies of work: The GOLD, RED, and RIVER series, in addition to TEXTS, including books, manifestoes and limited edition prints. These four divisions are heavily interrelated and cross pollinated. "...as an elaboration on a theme of the attraction and danger of Castrucci's New York: the night skyline defines the city's form and the river serves as silent witness or, seen in another light, the city is a body and the river is its veins." (Art In America, February 2000) Critic Carlo McCormick says, "when painting directly on large scraps of metal, Castrucci evokes a temporal uncertainty that debilitates the monumentality at hand. It is heavy metal played with the volume off, hard core slowed down to a waltz. Or conversely, it's an idealization of the softly sedate conveyed in the imprecations of the industrial age. Hopelessly romantic, Castrucci's painting presents the pictorial sublime..." (from "Desires of the Flesh" 1997) "Castrucci is an artist who has contended with this magical, mysterious and often menacing space called Manhattan for over two decades now. Andrew Castrucci is a portrait painter of the city we all love, who captures its primal essence not as a matter of realistic representation, but as a psychological study of the great ambivalence at the heart of this experience of living here." (Carlo McCormick, Tribes Magazine 2002).