Fabrizio Gerbino: One

Cindy Lisica Gallery presents Fabrizio Gerbino: One. Opening Reception Friday, January 8, 6pm-8:30pm. On view January 8 through February 6. It’s the exciting inaugural show of Cindy Lisica Gallery at 4411 Montrose!

The recent paintings of Fabrizio Gerbino are a convergence of the artist’s surroundings and a honed process of working with the single and basic element, carbon.

Working out of a former church-turned-studio on the edge of the “steel city” of Pittsburgh, Gerbino’s vision is unparalleled and stunning, as he painstakingly applies a mixture of gesso and carbon in a series of lines on stretched canvas paintings.

These large-scale pieces represent an incredible undertaking by the artist. For the viewer, the works deliver timely moments of profundity, while grasping the complexity of each piece that has been realized from the essential, or the core. The often breathtaking paintings are visually poetic, as Gerbino pays homage to the origin of drawing itself, the line, combined with the primary medium of carbon. The results are ethereal, atmospheric works of intense aesthetic quality.

One also presents the artist’s site-specific installation, Purge. With mathematical precision, he creates an entire wall of object-pairings featuring similar yet unique forms, all based on found objects that had been discarded from a ceramic workshop in Florence years ago.

The original sources “slept” in his studio for years, recently finding new life in his art. “In my work, often I begin with a found object,” Gerbino says. “It is just a point of departure. The image moves into abstraction and becomes something else.” (quoted in Trib Total Media, 2015)

Fabrizio Gerbino in The Warhol Museum’s Factory Direct (photo: Renee Rosensteel)] Fabrizio Gerbino (b. 1962) lives in Pittsburgh and was educated in Florence, Italy, at the Istituto Statale D’Arte and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze.

He has exhibited in museums from The Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory Museum, and The Carnegie Museum of Art, to the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno, in Arezzo, Italy. In 2014, he received the Juror’s Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and has been a recipient of the Eben Demarest Grant.

His works can be found in a number of impressive permanent collections, including BNY Mellon, Calgon Carbon Corporation, Cohen & Grigsby, Gateway Financial, RJ Lee Group, ADP, Villa Romana (German Foundation, Florence), The Elmhurst Group, Lilly Italia Corporation, Mancini’s Bakery, Inc., La Prima Espresso, Ateliers Höherweg e V., Düsseldorf, and the Air Force Academy, Florence.

Pictured: Untitled, 2015, acrylic and carbon on canvas, 72 x 72 inches (detail above, full image below).