Gianna Dispenza

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Round Table, London-based, American artist Gianna Dispenza’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following her U.S. solo debut in spring 2021. While the exhibition continues to showcase the artist’s integration of sculpture and painting, the new works on view here mark a significant evolution from the largely monochromatic palette and raw natural materials that characterized her previous exhibition. Dispenza has spent much of the last year pursuing an invigorated exploration of the full power of painting — relishing the freedom in a painterly hand, the dynamic surface qualities of oil paint when mixed with concrete or sand, the emotional potency of color, and the shifting ability of painted forms to take on narratives and meanings of their own making. The dozen vibrant, fiery, and illusive paintings that comprise Round Table showcase the discoveries of that exploration.

Though in their final states the paintings on view possess a range of hues and semi-abstract forms and structures, the compositional origins for nearly all start with the notion of the feast. For Dispenza, the feast functions as a rich metaphor with a multitude of strings to pull — interrogating how and what we consume, seemingly infinite human insatiability, extreme power dynamics, the relationships between our bodies and food, a table, one another. Her drawings begin most often with a depiction of three figures feasting at a round table. Yet over the course of several months, she works and reworks these familiar compositions until the drawing becomes nearly automatic, making way for new lines and forms to emerge from a far less controlled and more instinctual impulse. It’s at this stage when Dispenza begins to shift the drawing into painting. The translation is never direct however; the painting captures the idea of something, never an illustration, with the ideas within the paintings made more direct and urgent through the artist’s emotional use of fiery color.

Beyond the shifting and elusive nature of the paintings’ compositions, there lies a particularly compelling mystery in their formal making as well. Dispenza’s sculptural background and experimental approach to materiality culminates in these paintings’ crackling, textured surfaces. Throughout her practice, the artist has sought to infuse her work with natural and organic material, to ground her works with an inherent and independent vitality, subject to the universal forces of decay and mutability. In the past, this desire steered the artist to work with pure materials, pure clay, terracotta, or metal, in a limited palette. For the works in this show, Dispenza’s predilection for the natural and organic remains, yet has been directed in more nuanced, subtle fashions. Using concrete she mixes herself or sand sourced from nearby London construction sites, she alters the nature of her oil paints and of the canvases themselves to enliven her paintings with an evocative, undulating, nearly architectural quality. These natural elements introduce the organic, uncontrollable force Dispenza is after, triggering changes in color, material, and form that she never could have envisioned. With both their material qualities and narratives never immediately discernible, the paintings draw the viewer in closer to simultaneously solve the riddle of their creation and composition.

Ultimately, change is the prevailing and unifying force within the works of this exhibition. Round Table marks a culmination of the artist’s vulnerable embrace of change, an acknowledgement of the often overpowering and restrictive bonds between our ideas and our identities, and finally an embrace of what new ideas, narratives, and forms can be born when we exercise the muscles of change within ourselves.

Gianna Dispenza (b. 1990, Washington State, U.S.; works in London, U.K. BFA Sculpture, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, 2014. MA Painting, The Royal College of Art, London UK, 2020.) Gianna Dispenza studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute in California and painting at the Royal College of Art in London. Dispenza’s work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions in London, New York, Vienna, Como, Beirut, Saint Moritz, Daejeon, San Francisco and Étretat. Recent solo shows include Soft Blots Beneath the Sun at Charles Moffett, NY (2022) and The Sitter at Natasha Arselan Gallery, London (2022), as well as group shows at Frestonian Gallery (2023), Galleria Ramo (2023), and The Stable (2023). She was awarded a four month sculpture residency with Baraka Art Space in Athens, GR during the summer of 2023.