Opening Reception:
November 26, 6-8 PM
The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by the American artist Vincent Desiderio. The show opens Tuesday November 26th, 2019 with a reception from 6:00-8:00 pm and will continue through December 21st. This will be Desiderio’s tenth show with Marlborough Gallery.
The exhibition features ten new oil on canvas works created over the past two years as well as several earlier creations. Paintings by Desiderio often play cognitive readings against optical clues. Whether a depiction of characters from the films of Pasolini, foreboding rocky landscapes, a sleeping child or sniper, the often cryptic narratives achieve a profound impact both visually and emotionally. Viewers get the sense that they are standing at the threshold of a dream.
The central painting in the show is a nearly 12-feet long horizontal canvas entitled Dead White. A masterwork two years in the making that began as an anamorphic depiction of death masks, the painting became a depiction of a distorted cathedral-like structure, one that is torn and burnt. It evinces catacombs and an obscured and degraded Italian altarpiece in equal measure. Desiderio says of the work, “I began to realize that the painting had become something of a monument to time itself.” Like most of the works in the exhibition, it exists in a poetic, in-between space where time and place are constantly shifting and logic is something mutable and arguably irrelevant.
Born in 1955, Desiderio grew up in Media, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. He graduated from Haverford College and later attended the Fine Art Academy in Florence, Italy, followed by four years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Westchester County, New York. Desiderio has received several grants and painting awards, among which are the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts Painting Grant in 1987. He was the first American to receive the Grand Prize of S.A.S. Prince Ranier III, Thirtieth Annual Show of Contemporary Art in Monte-Carlo, Monaco in 1996.
His work can be found in many important public collections, including: The Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Galerie Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum of American Art, Philadelphia, PA; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. In 2005 D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers published a monograph devoted to his work, Vincent Desiderio: Paintings 1975-2005 with texts by Mia Fineman, Donald Kuspit, Barry Schwabsky and Lawrence Weschler.
For press inquiries, please contact:
info@marlboroughgallery.com
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