Sherry Frumkin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Giuseppe de Piero through October 9, 2010.
A catalog of the exhibition, with essay by Carmine Iannacone will be available. In one of the poems by the artist included in the catalog (a poem for each sculpture) de Piero suggests he is “writing with objects.â€
The sculptures and paintings in the exhibition “..going from nowhere to nowhere…†reference the distance in time, space and memory that exists in the 28 years between the studio he left in England in 1982 and his present studio in Long Beach, California.
In three previous exhibitions with the gallery, de Piero’s sculptures contained a conceptual narrative that ran through each work. An Hour Beyond Midnight in 1992 consisted of 12 pieces, each of which documented a move in an imaginary chess game. The works in Beyond the Boundary in 1994 re-created an imaginary Garden where a cricket match provided the means to examine ideas of rule making, rule breaking and fair play. Theoretical Existence, his last exhibition in the gallery in 1998, invited viewers to piece together a chain of circumstances alluded to in his previous shows.
Though no narrative per se runs through these 14 works, common themes appear. Hand made chains, water elements, birds, timepieces, allusions to chess and cricket and concrete word plays around measurements (a “hand†which equals 4 inches), a “chain†which equates to 22 yards, and a “stone†which is 14 pounds) are palpable elements of the works.
In his essay, Carmine Iannaccone observes, “Giuseppe de Piero hasn’t set out to create mysteries, he simply reframes the mystery of things that is already there. Any of his sculptures is no more enigmatic than the bowl of fruit on your kitchen table or the pair of slippers at the foot of our bed. On the other hand, it’s no less enigmatic than any one of those either.â€
Giuseppe de Piero was born to Italian parents and adopted as a toddler by a British coal miner and his Italian-born wife (who, family lore has it, was part of the Italian resistance). He grew up in rural post-war England in the small mining village of Keresley End where being Italian and Catholic made him something of an outsider.
He attended Nuneaton School of Art and then St Martin’s, the leading London art school, where experimentation in performance and other new art forms were in the ascendance. He famously referred to himself in the year at St Martin’s as “Prisoner in Room N 1974-5.â€
An irrepressible artist, de Piero founded the “GG†art movement, one of many performance groups to emerge in Great Britain in the early 1970s. Part conceptual artist, part exquisite craftsman, his works have been described as having “filtered Duchamp’s obsession with unsolvable puzzles through Joseph Cornell’s hauntingly sentimental assemblages and H.C. Westermann’s perversely well-made riddles.†(D. Pagel, LA Times)
The artist lives and works in Long Beach, California. This is his 4th solo with the gallery.
