Radical Chimeras

Firenze, IT

Stanza 251, Firenze, Italy (April - June, 2026)

Stanza 251 is proud to present a solo exhibition in Florence by Rob Mazurek, an internationally renowned American musician and composer who for decades has explored new musical modalities through his own ensembles, such as the Chicago Underground (Duo, Trio, Quartet, Orchestra) and the Exploding Star Orchestra, expanding the boundaries of jazz music through novel stylistic hybridizations. His primary instruments are the trumpet and cornet, and he also uses electronics to imbue his compositions with a unique multidimensional density.

Alongside this renowned and acclaimed musical activity, Mazurek—inspired by his direct encounter with Mark Rothko's paintings—has regularly pursued his own specific and adventurous research in the visual arts since the age of twenty. In this field too, the artist adopts a magmatic and visionary approach, pursuing a volcanic experimental vocation. His creations materialize in various abstract forms—paintings, sculptures, installations, videos—and are always imbued with unstoppable flows of energy. In his studio in Marfa, a city located in the West Texas desert, coloristic fragmentations animate the Desert Scores series of paintings, and furious chromatic overlays vibrate within the Scattered Amplitudes. A cosmic spirit hovers in his works, a reference to the boundless grandeur of the universe that expresses freedom and creative chaos. In his creative process, forms are broken down and recomposed, constructing new dynamic and engaging configurations. To create the works exhibited in this solo exhibition entitled “Radical Chimeras”, the artist worked directly in the spaces of Room 251, producing a series of site-specific works.

Rob Mazurek summarizes the spirit of the entire project as follows: “Radical Chimeras creates a field in which painting, sculpture, and sound impressions emerge as unstable vectors of vibration: material propositions shaped by frequency rather than form. Throughout the exhibition, the works are configured as chimerical constructs: hybrid objects in which sonic residues are transferred to surface and volume, erasing the distinctions between what is seen and what is heard. These are not representations, but condensations: post-sonic artifacts that retain the trace of duration as matter. Situated within an abstract continuum, the exhibition proposes a condition in which perception is continually renegotiated and in which form persists only as a temporary stabilization of an ever-changing energy.”