Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Francesca Gabbiani. This will be the first exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery for this Los Angeles based artist.
The exhibition will consist of approximately 6 large-scale, wall-size works and several smaller-scale works. Gabbiani’s medium is paper collage—she cuts colored paper into intricately shaped pieces, building up each work’s surface with layers of paper, then adding air-brush and gouache which create perspective and space. Her subjects are dramatic landscapes, interiors and architecture – based on both historic movie sets and her own seedy and sultry Los Angeles surroundings. The technique of cut-out paper creates rich patterns and complex relationships between the colors and shapes. She uses dramatic foreshortening as she creates diorama-like constructions that have a three dimensional quality.
Gabbiani is interested in movies and the way film, as an industry, is inherently connected to the city of Los Angeles. Her imaginary settings suggest a mystery plot or a dark narrative about to unfold. Gabbiani is an admirer of the films of Dario Argento – the Italian cult horror film master. Her landscapes and interiors have a foreboding sense to them. The scenes are absent of figures, yet traces of people are evident as the works evoke a sense of lingering events and uncertain states of mind. This ominous quality is particularly evident in two works where fire blazes on water in a spectacular manifestation.
Gabbiani was born in Montreal, Canada and moved to Switzerland as a child. She attended the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts in Geneva and also studied at the Rijksakadamie van Beeldende Kunsten (RAKB) in Amsterdam. She moved to Los Angeles in 1995 and received her MFA from UCLA. Gabbiani was featured in her first solo museum exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angles in February 2001.
This exhibition is supported in part by the Canadian Council for the Arts.