The Los Angeles-based artist Francesca Gabbiani had her first exhibition at I-20 in 1998. At that time she produced abstract works of wax and paint over aluminum. The innate restlessness of these works – whose swirling surfaces were scarred by nails and knives – gave away to smaller, more realistic paper collages, which were recently shown at the Mark Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles and Art & Public in Geneva . The new collages for Go to the Rainbow are larger works composed of adhesive vinyl on aluminum. These new works are both figurative and abstract. They are also obsessive and detailed. The landscapes include elusive memory-based impressions of a forest, palm trees by night, and a roller coaster.
Gabbiani was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1965. She moved to Switzerland and graduated from the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts in Geneva, and also studied at the Rijkskademie (RAKB) in Amsterdam. She moved to Los Angeles in 1995 and received her MFA from UCLA. She recently had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO) in Geneva; and also participated in Freie Sicht aufs Mittelmeer, curated by Bice Curiger, at the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.