Cianne Fragione

Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to present What Remains, Cianne Fragione's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Fragione (b. 1952) is an American artist of Italian heritage who lives and works in Washington, DC. This exhibition features nearly 30 artworks made in the past five years that range from paintings, drawings, collages, and assemblage works.

Over four decades, Fragione has developed her own process-oriented artistic vocabulary that crosses boundaries between abstract painting and sculpture, 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.

The artist's most recent series responds to Italian writer Eugenio Montale's Mediterraneo and Ossi di Seppia. According to Fragione, "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." An avid collector of items ranging from Italian lace, brushes, palettes, remnants of marble altars, and photographs, the fragmented materiality that informs Fragione's work calls to mind the significance of artifacts scattered across the borders of the Ionian Sea. "What is buried underneath to be found again," says the artist in reference to the archeological sites in Calabria, Italy. The intrinsic value of these objects is captured in the striking mixture of oil and handmade paints, raw pigments, textiles, bundled letters, drawings, journals, and scraps of old paintings that come together to form a poetry of associations. Becoming the subjects of long histories, Fragione's intricate collages and assemblage ultimately address memory as an avenue of engagement for the viewer.

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 offers 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.

Fragione has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including St. Mary’s College Museum of Art, Moraga, CA; Georgetown College, KY; Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York, NY; American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY, New York, NY; Associazione di Museo D’Arte Contemporaneo Italiano, Catanzaro, Italy; Harmony Hall Regional Center, Washington, MD; University of Scranton Art Museum, Scranton, PA; The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.; Art in Embassies, Geneva, Sofia, Bulgaria, and Vilnius, Lithuania; Indianapolis Art Center, IN; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gallery, CA. Her works are held in numerous public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art MD; DC Commission Art Bank Collection; Art-In-Embassies Permanent Collection, US State Department, Guadalajara, Mexico; St. Mary’s College Museum of Art, CA; Italian American Museum, D.C; Department of Special Collections, Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University, CA; Comune di Monasterace, Calabria, IT; among other museum and private collections. Fragione has been the recipient of awards, fellowships, and residencies, including Art Omi; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Fellowship; The Legacy Project (Saving the Legacy) supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation; Studio dei Nipoti artist residency, Monasterace, Italy; Soaring Gardens, Laceyville, PA; Spoleto Study Aboard in Spoleto, Italy; and an Artist-in-Institution grant by the California Arts Council. Sacramento CA. She was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award; and twice for the Anonymous Was a Woman Award for artistic achievement. She received her MFA (1987) in Painting/Mixed Media at John F. Kennedy University Fiberworks Center for the Arts, Berkeley, CA. During this time, she was a guest graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a fellowship that enabled her to work with artists associated with the beat and funk movements in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA from Goddard College, in 1981, Plainfield, VT.