Gowanus Print Lab presents Magdalena Marcenaro: Your Present is Still a Virgin. Born in Argentina, Magdalena Marcenaro has lived in New York City for more than a decade. Working with photography and mixed media, Marcenaro forms deeply textured, often ferocious, narratives joining nostalgic images with sudden, emotional moments. Her aim is to inspire dialogue about personal experience and prompt a thoughtful pause in the roller coaster of life.

Marcenaro’s latest body of work forms the upcoming exhibition “Your Present Is Still A Virgin,” opening on September 21, 2012 at Gowanus Print Lab, where she is currently artist in residence. Through multilayered narratives, she presents an optimistic worldview and suggests that, at any given moment, a fresh start is possible. Macenaro toys with both popular and religious iconography through photography, silkscreen, oil pastels, collage, and spray paint, with an eye to giving each piece an organic, poetic end form. Topics included beauty, consumerism, and romance, all connected by a desire to provoke conversation between different cultures and question the false ideas espoused in an overloaded mass media market.

In pieces like “The Price of Getting Paid,” Marcenaro succeeds in capturing the frantic pace of the urban environment. She mixes magazine cut-outs and manipulated $100 bills with harsh, near violent brush stroke in a loaded narrative fraught with tragedy and a fetishized female body. At other times, Marcenaro takes a more subtle approach. Her silk screen, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” evokes Ed Ruscha, and is most indicative of the artist’s belief in perpetual reinvention against even the toughest challenges. There is power in the both juxtaposition of media and juxtaposition of individual pieces in Marcenaro’s oeuvre. Ultimately, her concern lies in arresting motion and questioning the various connotations of virginity itself.

Marcenaro has shown previously in Buenos Aires and New York, including group shows at the Scope Foundation, The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and The Urban Folk Art.

For more information visit http://MagdalenaMarcenaro and http://www.gowanusprintlab.com/ Noah Callahan-Bever Creator-In-Chief @N_C_B Industries ncb1979.com