Yashar Gallery is proud to present Amelie Mancini’s first solo show in New York City, Sacrebleu! Napoleon Would Have Made A Fine Shortstop, a selection of seven large portraits of exceptional ballplayers painted between January and October 2010.

This newest series of paintings by Amelie Mancini takes its subjects from amongst some of Baseball’s most talented figures: Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, Harvey Haddix, Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver.

Each portrait is made of six small canvases assembled into a larger painting and is a study of a baseball hero at the height of his greatness, hitting a home run, pitching a perfect game, stealing home.  But theirs isn’t just any baseball field: it is a world of empty houses and ancient arches, built with bright acrylic paint and faux-marble, obeying primal geometry and disturbed by spatial ambiguity, ruled by legends and reverie.

A French expatriate and therefore fundamentally an outsider, Amelie Mancini uses this series to probe at the quintessentially American game of baseball from a European point of view.  Because she grew up without any knowledge of the game and its history, her attention is first captured by a melancholic face, a bulging bicep, a certain way to wear or lose a hat.  Through free-associations and the use of motifs from other eras, she unveils a world marked by a familiar kind of eerieness and an ominous melancholy, unleashing the uncanny ghosts of great things past.

_Amelie Mancini was born in Lyon, France in 1982. The older daughter of a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist, she studied Art at the Universite La Sorbonne in Paris and received a Master’s Degree in Design and Fine Arts in 2005. She went to her first baseball game ever at Shea Stadium in 2007 (Mets lost) and has since become actively obsessed with baseball, in particular with the Metropolitan Base Ball Club of New York. She started painting Exceptional Ballplayers in January 2010.

She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. _