Giuseppe Gabellone

Thursday, April 19, 2018 Quartz Studio is pleased to present a project by Giuseppe Gabellone (Brindisi, Italy, 1973), coinciding with the artist’s solo exhibition at Galleria Zero… in Milan. Giuseppe Gabellone’s exhibition is the second planned for 2018 by Quartz Studio, organized with the support of the Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte. Giuseppe Gabellone conceived a metal structure for Quartz’s space that is in physical opposition to the space’s walls and takes on anthropomorphic features. Gabellone says, “I wanted the sculpture to stretch in the space as much as possible. As if someone were opening their arms as far as they could to stop others from approaching or entering. The sculpture’s length is four meters by about one meter and seventy centimeters. There are forty light bulbs, which will be the space’s only lighting. The visual results are diagonal lines of light that jut into the room. The lamp is supported by a metal tripod with articulated joints. The tripod can be opened and closed and the lamp can be angled.” With its arms of artificial light, the metal structure that Gabellone designed for Quartz seems to seek at once to expand the space and to pose a challenge to the natural light from outside. The installation is dichotomous both in its amphibious approach to occupying the space, at once domineering and fragile, and in its industrial yet poetic appearance.

Giuseppe Gabellone is a sculptor with close ties to the history of 20th century sculpture, including Umberto Boccioni, Costantin Brancusi, Arturo Martini, and Henry Moore. Starting with the goal shared by every sculptor throughout the ages, since the kouroi in the archaic age—the three-dimensional rendering of a body in space—the way that Gabellone conceives his work has developed over the years into “sculpture in the expanded field,” as Rosalind Krauss called it in her famous essay [1]. Gabellone expanded the traditional approach to sculpture, adopting “different” techniques, such as photography, embossing, and installation. Sculpture in Gabellone’s work is a way to know and explore the space, investigating its nature and posing a challenge to its traits. The relationship between solid and void, sculpture and display, as well as the vantage point of the work’s observer are continuously inverted and questioned. Light, seen in Gabellone’s earlier projects as well, given a boost by the space’s unique open/closed nature, takes on a specific weight and becomes the expression of the metallic material’s organic energy, the point of connection between inside and out. The work is a visual attraction for those looking at it from the outside, and it is energy in action for those who come into its active space. Giuseppe Gabellone seems to have taken the work back to the zero degree for his piece for Quartz Studio. The artist completely eliminated the pictorial and material component of making sculpture that was found in his earlier work and replaced it with a poetically humanized physical minimalism of light.

Giuseppe Gabellone (Brindisi, 1973) lives and works in Paris. Select solo exhibitions include: Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2017), GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2013), Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan (2008), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2002), and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2000). Select group exhibitions include: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2009); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001); Museu Serralves, Porto (2001); S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2000); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (1996); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea – Castello di Rivoli (2000); Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (1995). He has also exhibited at many international festivals, including: the Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003); the Lyon Biennial (2003); Documenta Kassel (2002); the Sydney Biennial (1998); and the Santa Fe Biennial(1997). Giuseppe Gabellone is represented by greengrassi, London, and Zero…, Milan.

The project was made possible by the support of Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte. Quartz Studio and Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte would like to thank the artist. The exhibition will be open from April 19 to June 30, 2018, by appointment.

[1] See Rosalind E. Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, 1979.