May 22 – July 10, 2010

Opening reception: Saturday, May 22

Artist Talk: 7 pm

Lora Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist, Francesca Gabbiani, entitled Dream Baby Dream.

Viewed from a distance Francesca Gabbiani’s intricate assemblages are easily mistaken for paintings. Their flattened realism is upon closer inspection composed of thousands of densely layered abstract shapes of cut paper. The often decadent imagery present in Gabbiani’s work complements and echoes her craft. Influenced by cinema, the interior space - both physical and metaphysical - as well as melancholia, Francesca Gabbiani illustrates surreal fleeting moments.

This exhibition will feature a selection of the artist’s new interior works. In House of Falling Leaves a winding staircase nostalgic of M.C. Escher’s impossible architecture, Gabbiani evokes a foreboding and ephemeral mise-en-scene. Robbing her interiors of physical beings, she carefully manipulates elements synonymous with German Expressionism to create a Hopper-like solitude - making use of odd angles and stark contrast to set the mood. For the first time, Gabbiani has expanded her interiors into the realm of sculpture, inspired by the 1973 cult film “The Holy Mountain”, by Alejandro Jordorowsky. During the production of this film the actors and Jordorowsky heavily  experimented with hallucinogens to modify their perception of reality - a dominant practice amongst the writers and artists which regularly influence Gabbiani’s work. She makes reference to this practice by adorning pieces such as Wreath with bottles of elixirs, cannabis leaves, opium flowers and mythical creatures hidden and tangled in the rococo layers.

Francesca Gabbiani was born in Montreal and grew up in Geneva, Switzerland.  She has thrice received the Swiss Federal Award of Art, where she attended the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Geneva. She has had a mid-career retrospective at the CentrePasquArt, Bienne, Switzerland and a show of new work at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and at the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany, and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer and Yale University, among others.