Luisa Rabbia: Travels With Isabella

Artist Luisa Rabbia spent time at the Gardner Museum as an Artist-in-Residence in 2007, during which time she was inspired by photographs that Isabella Stewart Gardner collected while traveling in China in 1883.

The New York-based artist returns this summer for a contemporary exhibition, on view from June 27 to September, 2008, Travels with Isabella, in which she uses these archival photographs to create a video of an imaginary landscape animated with her own drawings, as well as with other images and music also inspired by her residency. The result is a fantastical narrative that is both contemporary and historical.

Luisa Rabbia’s work is deeply rooted in drawing, which she sees as a platform that unites rational construct with the imagination. The dynamic tension that exists in drawing between the subject figure and its background, the being and becoming of space and time, has influenced much of Rabbia’s work with paper, papier-mache, porcelain, and animation. Her evocative work was described in Artforum as “tinged with a sadness that spoke of the precariousness, isolation, and fragility of human existence.”

Lusia Rabbia was born in Turin, Italy in 1970 and currently lives and has a studio in New York City. She received a Masters’ degree from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin and trained as a studio assistant to artist Gilberto Zorio of the Arte Povera movement. Rabbia has had solo exhibitions at the Associazione San Gimignano, the Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York, Giorgio Persano Gallery, Turin and the Arco Art Fair, Madrid. -- www.gardnermuseum.org

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