FRANCESCA DIMATTIO
Francesca DiMattio’s practice draws on the history of craft and the decorative arts, re-evaluating their narratives through a feminist lens while she expands her visual language to include the materiality of adornment. Elements typically perceived as ornamental, such as beading, knitting, and flower arranging, become viral, contradicting the forms they envelop with an ominous tone. While using a historically domestic medium, she surprises the viewer with towering, seemingly impossible forms. Her sculptures counter traditional expectations, each work being a gathering of opposite parts, male and female, animal and human, animate and inanimate. Her process, at once destructive and creative, imbues the resulting hybrid with a sense of instability. In this way, DiMattio explores conflicting notions of womanhood, presenting feminine identity as a balancing act, precarious and full of contrasting possibilities.
Informed by her early painting, epic polyptychs of dizzying architectural forms, DiMattio’s sculptures combine the fractured dynamism of her painting with the weighty materiality of clay. DiMattio mines the narrative of sculpture and ceramics to trace how imagery moves through history. Ranging from Ming vases, Sèvres porcelain and Wedgwood china to disposable knick-knacks, these associations display shifting notions of value and desire. Translating each reference by hand and underlining formal similarities, her seemingly disparate objects compress time and space. Highlighting this instability of meaning, DiMattio collapses hierarchies between high and low culture, destabilising fixed perceptions of identity, and underlining the surprising closeness of opposing qualities, both cultural and material.
Francesca DiMattio (b. 1981) studied at Cooper Union, NY and Columbia University, NY. Her recent exhibitions include Snapdragons, a duo exhibition with Caroline Coons at Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York (2025); the Inaugural Exhibition, The Campus, Claverack, NY (2024); Wedgwood, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023); Slip Tease, Kasmin, NY (2023); Ceramics in the Expanded Field, MASS MoCA, MA (2021-23); Dialogues Across Disciplines, Wellin Museum of Art, NY (2023); Sèvres, Nina Johnson, Miami (2022); A Form of Magic, Morán Morán, Mexico City (2022); Statues, Art Omi, Ghent (2019-20); Caryatid, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2019), Francesca DiMattio: Housewares, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2014), and Banquet, ICA Boston, MA (2010-11). Collections include Bass Museum, Miami, FL; SFMoMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham; Paisley Museum & Art Galleries, Glasgow; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Frances Young Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs; Perez Art Museum, Miami, amongst others.
Text courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
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