Francesca Gabbiani 'The Flowers of Romance'    Jul 12 - Sep 7, 2008

Monica De Cardenas Gallery in Zuoz is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist Francesca Gabbiani, entitled The Flowers of Romance.

Known for her luminous paper collages depicting interiors and landscapes charged with a subtly mysterious und uncanny atmosphere, in this new group of works her attention zooms in on the natural actors in the scenes: plants, trees, flowers and mushrooms, with their lively presence in gardens, fields and forests, but also in architectural ornaments like frames and mirrors,balustrades and stuccos.
The seducing beauty of these plants is deceptive and hides mysteries: healing or dangerous powers, bearing a magnitude of cultural significances and memories; Opium, Laudanum or Absinth are some of their names.

The complexity of the collaged interiors impress in a similar way as the gnarls in her trees. Hidden beasts, birds of prey, cherubs and spider webs found among the intricacies in her interiors correspond to the layered texture of the bark in her trees. The natural and manmade details lead onlookers through them and back to the surface exploring texture and process.

Gabbiani’s works function on emotional and visceral levels - whether it is the lack of reflection in the blackness of a mirror, the eerily unpopulated yet candlelit interiors, or the seemingly endless space in her forest. The emotional tenor of Gabbiani’s work feels strangely familiar - its theatricality and narrative allusions echo from the past and conjure fables as well as classic Hollywood tales.

Her working methods are quite complex as layers of paper are intricately cut out and collaged on top of one another. This process is a breaking down of an image through color and then reconstructing that image through layering. These layers create a depth and perspective that is both painterly and sculptural. Gabbiani directs the material, colored paper, to have dramatic effects. She is constructing memory in the most literal sense, piecing together images that are full of desire and suspence.

Francesca Gabbiani was born in Montreal and grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where she attended the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts and received the Swiss Federal Award of Art three times in a row. She has had a mid-career retrospective at the CentrePasquArt, Bienne, Switzerland and a show of new work at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and at the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany, and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and The Hammer and in Yale University Art Gallery collection in New York, among others.