New York artist exhibits works at Museum of Art – DeLand

BY RICK DE YAMPERT

New York City artist Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso, whose retrospective exhibition opens Jan. 12 at the Museum of Art – DeLand Downtown Galleries, is aware that “most people either love or hate the clown, with no in-between,” she says.

But people’s coulrophobia — the scientific name for a fear of clowns, a phenomenon that’s been widely studied — didn’t prevent Dellosso or museum curator Tariq Gibran from featuring several of the artist’s clowns in her upcoming show.

Those clowns will hang beside Dellosso’s many homages to past women painters, in which she merges her own likeness with the faces, styles and scenes of their self-portraits. The results, as in Homage to Frida Kahlo (Self-Portrait), can be striking in a Twilight Zone sort of way, even while, as Gibran writes in the exhibit’s curator statement, Dellosso’s techniques recall her favorite painters — Rembrandt, Vermeer and Goya and other great European masters.

In one instance, the exhibition’s offbeat, even mildly eerie vibe goes beyond Dellosso’s self-portrait mashups and what some people consider to be scary clown faces: One of Dellosso’s paintings, an untitled work, depicts a clown lying supine (Is he dead or sleeping?) amid confetti in a nearly barren field with Manhattan’s unmistakable Twin Towers in the distant background.

“That painting was started before 9/11,” said Dellosso, a native New Yorker and the daughter of a Cuban father and Ecuadorian mother.

“I came up with the whole idea of the clown buried in confetti, which is typically joyful and associated with a party, and I was like ‘This landscape feels right to me.’ It was a feeling thing. And then what happened was the shock of a life,” she added.

While growing up, Dellosso and her father, who studied art and drawing before immigrating to the U.S. following the Cuban Revolution, would frequent the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They always made sure to check out works by one of their favorite painters — Rembrandt.

Given such influences, it’s no surprise that Dellosso says she was always drawing since she was very, very young.

“I would create stories with pictures and I created all these characters and I would put them in books,” she said.

Dellosso studied in New York at the Art Students League and the National Academy School before earning her bachelor’s degree in fine art from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. “The Paintings of Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso: A Retrospective,” which runs Friday, Jan. 12, through Saturday, March 30, is her first career-spanning solo exhibition.

On her website, gabrieladellossoart.com, Dellosso describes herself as a “narrative realist.” She classifies her works into three areas: narratives, clowns and homage art.

“Storytelling is at the center of all my work,” she says in the Narratives section of her website. She considers her paintings to be “visual stories … If the observer looks longer, my hope is that they discover the layers I have woven to create a narrative that resonates and enriches the psyche.”

Her love of story, narrative and words runs in her family. Her grandmother and great-grandfather were well-known poets in South America, and her aunt, Karina Galvez, is “a very well-known poet internationally,” Dellosso said.

As for clowns, “I can only guess as to why I have such a connection,” she said during a phone interview from her New York home. “One of my earliest memories is when I was a little girl and my grandmother took me to a caravan circus in a tent on the beach. I don’t know if the fascination came through there, but I remember always going to the amusement parks and looking for the clowns to take pictures with them.”

For Dellosso’s “Homage” works, she took cues from self-portraits by both famous and lesser-known women artists from the Renaissance to the modern era, such as Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Amrita Sher-Gil, Constance Mayer and many others.

Dellosso said that Tariq Gibran, the DeLand Museum’s curator, had wondered if she ever considered herself a magic realist — a part of that school of art that the Tate Museum in London describes as “modern realist paintings with fantasy or dreamlike subjects.”

“It’s not something I’ve ever really thought about,” Dellosso said. “But I can tell you something with certainty: There is an unexplainable element when I’m creating a work of art. I don’t know how it happens, but it must be a marriage between the subconscious and what I’m trying to do.”

As Dellosso continues to ponder the idea of magic realism, her thinking wanders from not only the subjects of her paintings, but also the process that creates them.

“I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I feel like I was meant to paint a work like it is,” she said. “I’m not intending to be a magic realist at all, but the stories like the painting with the clown and the confetti — it’s almost like I’m meant to do things. So when Tariq said magic realist, I’m like ‘You know what, that probably does fit the bill.’”

If you go: “The Paintings of Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso: A Retrospective”runs Jan. 12 through March 30 at the Museum of Art – DeLand Downtown Galleries, 100 N. Woodland Blvd. Museum hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 1-4 p.m. Sunday. Admission costs $10, with museum members getting in for free.

On Saturday, Jan. 13, 7-10 p.m., the museum will host a Gala Fundraiser at the Downtown Galleries. The evening, sponsored by AdventHealth, Alliance Community, Mainstreet Bank, trustee Lisa Ogram and Merrill A Bank of America Company, features butlered hors d’oeuvres, signature cocktails, and classical guitar by Alejandro Imana. Cocktail attire is recommended. Tickets cost $100 per person, and may be purchased in advance at https://moartdeland.org/event/2024-fundraiser-gala/#tribe-tickets__tickets-form.