About Anthony Scarzafava

Anthony Scarzafava is a New York area painter whose practice spans more than four decades. A graduate of Pratt Institute, Scarzafava has developed an evolving body of abstract and mixed media work shaped by experimentation, found materials, collage, color, texture, and the accumulation of personal and visual history.

For more than forty years, Scarzafava has collected discarded materials and images that capture his attention, including photographs, newspaper clippings, postcards, children's drawings, diagrams, and other fragments of everyday life. These materials frequently become the starting points for his paintings. An image, piece of text, or object is placed on the canvas and becomes the first element in an intuitive process of layering color, texture, line, and form.

The resulting works reflect a sustained interest in transformation: taking familiar or discarded materials and placing them into new visual relationships. Over the course of his career, this process has developed into a number of distinct bodies of work, including B48, 100 Suns, All My Ghosts, Sonnets, Before and After Science, Postcards From Titan, The White Visitation, Male and Female, Totem, and God Lives Underwater.

The relationship between collected materials and personal history is particularly evident in the B48 series. The works incorporate materials Scarzafava accumulated during his twenty-eight years as an IT analyst at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. As technology and the workplace evolved, he saved objects and materials that might otherwise have been discarded. These remnants eventually became part of a body of paintings reflecting both his working life and his long-standing practice of collecting and transforming the unexpected.

The title B48 refers to the storeroom where Scarzafava worked during the later years of his career. The paintings transform the discarded materials accumulated there into something new, creating a visual record of a particular period of his life while continuing the artistic process he had developed over decades.

Today, Scarzafava continues to paint and develop new bodies of work, drawing on an extensive personal archive of images and materials accumulated throughout his life and an ongoing commitment to experimentation.

For a full list of exhibitions, education, and projects, view Anthony’s CV.

A man in a red shirt stands in an art studio, observing colorful paintings on the wall, with painting supplies and artwork on a table.
A man with short dark hair, wearing an orange shirt, sitting at a desk with art supplies, focused on painting. A desk lamp illuminates his workspace, with a colorful abstract painting in the background.