Cianne Fragione: What Remains
“…My formal and compositional preoccupations with stacked forms have at least some crucial bases in my experience of the Italian land, the South especially. From high on one of the ragged mountain ranges that soar abruptly above the Ionian Sea, in sight of the water, visual perspective simply disappears, or dissolves, aligning into a simple, flat perspective, like a screen, almost a non-perspective.“
－Cianne Fragione
Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to present What Remains, Cianne Fragione’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, with artworks created in the past five years. Fragione (b.1952) is an American born artist of Italian heritage who lives and works in Washington, DC. The exhibition will feature nearly 30 wall works ranging from paintings, drawings, collages, and assemblages in various scales.
Over four decades, Fragione has developed her own process-oriented artistic vocabulary that crosses boundaries between abstract painting and sculpture, and between object and image. While a sense of space and movement dominates her two-dimensional works, her assemblage pieces tend to be denser and more corporeal. Refined and scruffy surfaces on her paintings and collages evoke encrusted layers of time-laden structures and landscapes. Meanwhile, delicately drawn lines enlarge the surface narratives by creating open spatial fields.
Fragione’s most recent works respond to two collections of poems by Italian poet and writer Eugenio Montale: Mediterraneo and Ossi di Seppia. “One significant aspect of Montale's poetry is its ability to develop and vividly express an iconography of ordinary objects in ways that reshape everyday life experience with imagination, unpredictability, and sensitivity. I share this intention as well as some of Montale’s linguistic spirit; my work draws upon similar types of formal motifs that refer to memories, traditions, and histories, both personal and cultural.”
A striking combination of oil paint, mixed-media materials, and found objects and textiles invite graceful and rough transitions in Fragione’s work. Each work is built slowly, over lengthy periods, becoming a dense synthesis of influences and personal perspectives, including mid-century gestural abstraction, her close connection to the expressive work of the San Francisco Bay Area Beat and Funk artists, and the physical fluency of her early training as a professional dancer. “(…) unlike a performance, which is ephemeral, the canvas or sheet of paper has become the stage, the space in which movement is orchestrated and inscribed in durable, articulate form.”- says the artist, speaking of her artistic transition from dance to visual arts.
The artwork on view will offer valuable insight into Fragione’s seasoned artistic practice and gestural achievements and introduce several works from the past few years that have never been publicly shown.
ABOUT CIANNE FRAGIONE
Cianne Fragione (b. 1952) is a multidisciplinary artist. With roots in the San Francisco Bay Area Beat and Funk art milieus, she has developed her own process-oriented artistic vocabulary over the past four decades that crosses boundaries between abstract painting and sculpture, and between object and image. Fragione's art is deeply rooted in experimentation and a commitment to pushing the limits of form and medium, establishing her as a significant voice in contemporary art.
Fragione has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.; Art in Embassies in Geneva, Sofia, and Vilnius; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gallery. Her works are held in major collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the DC Commission Art Bank Collection, the US State Department's Art-In-Embassies Permanent Collection in Guadalajara, and Stanford University’s Special Collections. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships, including Art Omi, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Fellowship, and nominations for the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.