Born in 1962, lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA)
Fabrizio Gerbino is an Italian painter and sculptor who relocated from Florence, Italy, to his wife’s hometown of Stowe Township, Pennsylvania, in 2003. Like the neighboring town of McKees Rocks and many other Pittsburgh neighborhoods Stowe was once a populous industrial center, home to steel mills, metal shops, and factories that now stand abandoned. Since moving there, and making a studio from an old, deconsecrated church, Gerbino has made a paintings and sculptures that increasingly reflect the look and feel of his adopted surroundings, often incorporating such vestiges of the industrial past as gas tanks, gutters, and chain-link fence, among other more ambiguous forms.
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Many of Gerbino’s paintings meld representation and abstraction, evoking the uncanny experience of encountering a mysterious artifact: an object that seems familiar yet remains elusive as to its precise purpose or proper place.
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The paintings that include human figures and faces are especially suggestive in this respect, as Gerbino gives the viewer enough information to draw them in to what feels like a story, yet obscures details that might define any particular narrative. Hovering at the threshold of recognition, these works posit painting as a way of seeing, and of encoding the experiential dimensions of time, memory, and emotion within a visual image.
Amanda Donnan
Curatorial Assistant Contemporary Art
Carnegie Museum of Art
(Text from The Pittsburgh Biennial 2011)
Andy Warhol Museum: Factory Direct (Archived August 19, 2016)
Factory Direct: Fabrizio Gerbino (pgs. 22-24) (PDF) (Archived September 12, 2016)