Gallery Representation:
The Eleanor Ettinger Gallery
119 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012
212-925-7474
www.eegallery.com
FINE ART CONNOISSEUR : TODAY’S MASTERS™
September/October 2008 (pg. 60)
Three to Watch:
Artists Making Their Mark
There is a lot of superb art being made these days; this column shines light
on a trio of talents GABRIELA GONZALEZ DELLOSSO (b. 1968) is a New
Jersey-based painter who might just as easily have flourished in theatre
or film. “I like drama,” she admits, “so my subjects tend to be almost
theatrical. And dressing up has been part of my life since I was
a child.” It is hardly surprising, then, that Dellosso relishes clowns and
the Cirque du Soleil, or that her family regularly attends Venice’s Carnival
to admire revelers’ elaborate masks and robes.
Although Dellosso’s large, colorful pictures of one or several figures
— often female — hint at possible storylines, they rarely specify
one. Instead, viewers are left to wonder at her historicized
props and costumes, which she buys secondhand
and reworks with her mother’s assistance.
“My art is about looking beneath the surface,” she
notes, “because things are not always what they appear
to be.” Her other-worldly compositions range
from the reasonably straightforward — like The
Queen pictured here — to the downright baroque,
with half a dozen figures gesturing emphatically.Yet
even when these pictures are cropped or framed to
evoke altarpieces, Dellosso subtly signals they were
made in the 21st century: An otherwise timeless figure
sports a designer logo, and somehow an elderly
lady reading a book deftly sidesteps the sentimentality
to which other artists might succumb, presenting
us with a dispassionate honesty that nonetheless
engages.
This discretion is particularly admirable in view
of Dellosso’s penchant for brides; quite rightly, she
sees weddings as circus-like, yet her hieratic images
of young women in gowns emphasize an allegorical
power rather than mawkishness. The artist herself
poses often, as does her mother, whose timeless
face convinces in a range of historical outfits.
Dellosso has clearly studied past masters and
borrows only what she needs to say something new:
Here we glimpse the foreground ledge from a Renaissance
portrait, there the smoky palette and atmosphere
of Rembrandt, and always the haunted
stillness of Surrealism. It never feels derivative,
however, and this may well owe to the fact that Dellosso
grew up (in Astoria, Queens) around people
with something to say. Her grandmother and
great-grandfather were respected poets in their native
Ecuador, and her father was a painter who often
took her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to
look closely. As a child she created her own comics,
and was actually majoring in psychology at New
York University when she transferred to Manhattan’s
School of Visual Arts to earn a bachelor of
fine arts. She then refined her skills at the Art Students
League, and finally at the National Academy.
Dellosso likes to draw in charcoal and pastel, and
rarely begins painting without preparatory drawings
and value sketches. She works from both the live
model and reference materials; although she sometimes
consults photographs, she does not copy them, preferring instead
the lively mix of finito and non-finito that photographs can never offer.
Dellosso paints in oil on linen and panel, though rarely canvas,with surfaces
measuring as long as 80 inches. This ambitious scale infers that
sales are good, and indeed her star has been rising since a solo show at
the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio two years ago.
Dellosso is represented by Eleanor Ettinger Gallery in New York (212-925-7474),
where her next exhibition will be on view October 16 through November
9.