Landscapes: Up Close
Hair, Clouds, Petals, Grass, Mountain, Forest Bathing, The Moon 2022-2023
Fields
ECLIPSE
“Each work brims with its own history and is suggestive of the history of the earth itself. In an interplay of chance and control, the richly worked surfaces reveal beautiful translucencies to layers underneath."
- Britta Konau, Gabriella D’Italia at Asymmetrick Arts, The Free Press
MOUNTAINS
FOREST BATHING
“D'Italia's work in general is of a highly inquisitive nature. Time, incremental change, and material layering are recurrent interests and strategies. And while her paintings are beautifully nuanced abstract pieces in their own right, they do not stop there. Through variegated repetition from painting to painting, the works do not only suggest landscapes but make perception and representation of the land itself the subject. The artist's extended inquiry into associative evocation frames the land in terms of eons and unformed masses as the "Landscapes" suggest material evidence of geological time. At the same time they explore what makes us approach them as landscapes at all. The answers lie in the paintings themselves: color, texture, format and memory as they draw on what we have seen and experienced."
- Britta Konau, Gabriella D’Italia at Asymmetrick Arts, The Free Press
PETALS
Clouds (2) in collector’s home designed by Monica Lederman.
Fleeting Moments (clouds) in collector’s home designed by Monica Lederman
Clouds; ink on board, 60” x 60” (private collection)
CLOUDS
Ink, graphite, and acrylic on paper or canvas. Custom and scalable.
HAYSTACKS
Land Frames
22” x 48”
collage on board, 2013
(private collections)
“Gabriella D'Italia, who is best known for her extraordinary OCD-textured "women's work" hand-made fibre works, was represented in several collage shows by her smeary material "landscapes" that superficially seem to be at odds with the pro-craft feminist view-point of her fibre work. But when the landscapes begin to unravel into material indulgence (they are extremely abstract) the literalism of their processes returns them - prodigal - to the textured design sense of fabric with a handmade cast. In other words, D'Italia uses collage to bring her painting full circle back to the meme of hand-crafred production by women."
- Dan Kany, Something in the Water, Kolaj Magazine, Issue Ten