Francesca Gabbiani

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Nom de Guerre, an exhibition of Francesca Gabbiani’s explorations of ceremonial healing, forbidden knowledge, oral history, and the intertwined legacies of plants, ritual, and resistance. The multimedia exhibition marks Gabbiani’s return to encaustic and an engagement with new material language.

Drawing upon the legacy of assumed names, or pseudonyms adopted by revolutionaries to protect their identities, Nom de Guerre invokes the endurance of marginalized histories, survived through coded language and acts of transmission. Inspired by Gabbiani’s two-sided artist’s book, Bible, the exhibition unfolds across media ranging from encaustic painting to bronze sculpture, mirroring the transformation of traces of knowledge, passed down through generations.

Conceived as an intimate, devotional field guide of abstract drawings and textual fragments inspired by folklore, mythology, botanical illustration, and ritual ceremony, Bible brings distinct, yet interconnected histories into dialogue. One side, titled Nom de Dieu! explores plants associated with visionary and ceremonial practices, including psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, ayahuasca, and San Pedro cactus; the other, titled Nom de Guerre considers plants historically associated with fertility and reproductive autonomy, such as castor, artemisia, milkweed, and myrrh. Gabbiani considers the role of plants as talismans, repositories that protect and house cultural memory.

Through an aesthetic meditation on modes of concealment and excavation, Gabbiani’s approach to encaustic echoes the movement of narrative through time. Across the carved surface of each canvas, the artist’s fluid, gestural excavations reveal fragments of layered color beneath a cloudy haze of white wax. While two of the encaustic canvases pay direct homage to the visual language of Bible, the others take inspiration from the dispersal of dandelion seeds. The densely encased color pathways evoke the transient journey of knowledge passed down, detached from origin to take root elsewhere. Alongside the selection of wall works, a bronze-patinated broom rests on the floor. Long present in folklore as a protective or magical object, the broom evokes the realm of the domestic, granting fractured traces of knowledge a home, a space to commune, and to restore.

In a journey across media and ceremony, Nom de Guerre excavates the material transmission of knowledge, revealing the role of storytelling in the preservation of collective memory and ritual survival. Together, Gabbiani’s works trace how botanic histories are maintained and passed down, despite efforts to suppress them. Through intimate and mysterious exchanges, the adaptive and unceasing devotion to transmission under threat of obscurity reveals a legacy of whispered, yet potent pathways to collective resistance.

Nom de Guerre is Francesca Gabbiani's third exhibition with Wilding Cran Gallery.

Francesca Gabbiani (b. 1965, Montreal, Canada, raised Geneva, Switzerland) Selected solo exhibitions include Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2026, 2023); Cedric Bardawil Gallery, London, UK (2023); Mixografia, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX (2021); Monica De Cardenas, Milan, IT (2021) and Zuoz, CH (2020); Gavlak, Los Angeles, CA (2018), and film screenings at the Malibu International Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA (2023, awarded Best Experimental Short); Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills at San Vicente Bungalows. Los Angeles, CA (2022); and the Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA (2022). Selected two person and group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2025, 2022); Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2025); The Brick, Los Angeles, CA (2025); West Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2025); Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, CA (2025); Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, Monaco (2025); Kunsthaus Centre d'Art Pasquart, Biel/Bienne, CH (2023); MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Kunsthaus Zurich, CH (2021); KANAL Centre Pompidou, Brussels, BE (2020); Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA (2018); MAMCO Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva, CH (2016), and the Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2014). Her work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Collection, CH; and the Universitat St. Gallen, among others. Gabbiani lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.