Giuseppe Gabellone

Born 1973 in Brindisi, Italy
Lives and works in Paris, France

“Gabellone belongs to a generation of Italian artists that was spared the trauma of those who, at the beginning of the 1990s, like children of a divorced couple, had to choose to follow the steps of either the more conservative Transavanguardia movement of the 1980s or the remains of that revolutionary movement called Arte Povera from the late 1960s. Gabellone was young enough to look at history as something still not relevant enough to interfere with the growing pains of his own creative language. Painting and sculpture, along with certain concepts or materials, are just tools to be exploited enough to achieve a specific image or idea; they are not, for Gabellone’s generation, ideological areas that demand an oath of honor that will define an artist’s lifetime production.

Gabellone is a sculptor. Or we could say that he is an artist who is developing an inquiry into the sculptural elements of architecture, photography, and memory, so that the sculpture is not self-contained but refers to how the mind processes memories. When we are in front of Gabellone’s sculptures or photographs we are forced to imagine where they come from, what kind of nature generates them and if, in the case of the photographs, whether they really existed somewhere before or if, in our digital age, they are simply the result of some skilful manipulation. In fact all that we see in his works existed in reality at one point or another and was conceived from scratch by the artists mind and often created with his own labor.”

— Francesco Bonami