Francesca DiMattio


Francesca DiMattio is an American artist born and based in New York City. She makes paintings and ceramic sculpture that weave elements using architectural, design, cultural and historical references.

Life

DiMattio grew up in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. Her mother was a college counselor and ceramist and her father was a vision scientist in the Physiology Dept. at NYU Medical Center. She attended NYC Public schools including the Lab School and LaGuardia High School of Music and Art graduating in 1999.
She received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2003 and her MFA from Columbia University of the Arts in 2005.
She lives and works in New York City and Hillsdale, NY.

Career

Francesca DiMattio is an American artist born and based in New York City. She makes paintings that weave spaces using architectural, cultural and historical references. Patterns, textures and imagery combine to forge a logical cohesion from apparently disparate and chaotic elements. Large mural works on canvas have been displayed in the Saatchi Gallery in London, Locust Projects in Miami, Salon 94 Bowery in NYC and the ICA in Boston.
In recent solo shows in New York City and London she has introduced ceramic sculpture that aspires to the monumental via a feminine strength and whimsy. DiMattio fractures and reconfigures a wide array of references including art history, children’s books, cartoons, pop culture, and craft. Though elements seem ready-made, she, in fact, sculpts and glazes everything by hand. Her sculptures are complex and multifaceted—each angle revealing seemingly endless experimentations in ceramic and glazing techniques. Throughout each assemblage, DiMattio’s layering and fragmentation maps a crucial dialogue between cultures and styles, pointing to the plasticity of representation. Through shifts in scale, elements that are typically accents become primary. Things do not behave as expected. Tiny figurines appear over scaled, floral motifs become viral, and torsos morph from flora and fauna. Through painting and the hybridization of art and craft she has introduced a dialogue with the past that has enlivened the contemporary world art scene.
Her ceramic sculptures include monumental candelabras heavy with historical references suggesting the weight of ceramic styles on chaotic post-modern lighting and living. Her totems reference Greek Caryatids carried into a present rethinking of the weight women bear today.A large monstrous 9-foot tall piece, She-Wolf, evokes Yeats’, The Second Coming with its ending …” And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
The Caryatid works “exemplify this penchant for hybridity, each one encapsulating several oppositions between masculine and feminine, playful and serious, contemporary and ancient, high culture and low”. DiMattio takes traditional aspects of femininity and adds different components to the design of the sculpture.“Despite the show’s title, one was immediately struck by the fact that these figures had been liberated from their traditional role as architectural supports”. The layering in her work is not only visual but also figurative, for example the freeing of the caryatid can be looked at as freeing the female body of traditional view. DiMattio also creates paintings that “take architecture as their subject as a means to restructure the concept of space”. In her paintings Ladder and Broken Arch at the Saatchi Gallery,“elements collide into each other, become entangled, and co-exist—complicating our understanding of perspective and space. Her work seems to exist somewhere in between the abstract and the figurative”. In Boston, DiMattio has transformed the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall with a complex composition made up of five large-scale canvases. Drawing inspiration from the dramatic architecture and waterfront setting, Banquet combines interior and exterior space and incorporates images of ships and the sea.
and the ICA in Boston. Blaffer Art Museum, Francesca DiMattio, Blaffer Art Museum, Housewares June 2014; Bruce Zimmerman,The Brooklyn Rail, Nov.6, 2019

Exhibitions