Jeffrey Morabito
JEFFREY MORABITO
Artist Statement
I place recognizable figures/objects into unrecognizable picture planes, and vice versa. By seeing objects as pictorial containers, such as vases with images, landscapes through windows, imagery in fashion, reflections in glass or airplane windows, I am able to make subversive paintings that question how we see and what we recognize.
It is important to create a space of exchange between the material object of the painting and the viewer. When the works are viewed from different distances, they move between surfaces you look at and surfaces you look through.
I amplify both visual and sensory juxtapositions that I normally see in the world. Heavy impasto paint says this is an object that can be touched and felt, while simple emblematic shapes says this is a flat shape while inferring the illusion of a portal to a different world.
By limiting the shapes I focus on – a circle, an x, parallel lines – I can focus on the qualities latent in the form. Much like the Enso circle in Japanese calligraphy, these attributes are simplicity, asymmetry, expediency, subtlety, and the absence of pretense.
My choice of subject is biographical, both in a cultural and arbitrary sense. In spirit of choosing subjects without any pretense, I pick topics I see on my daily bicycle commute to the studio; overpriced Avocado toast from the cafe where I get coffee, the complex yet mundane reflections I see in cars along the way. Drawing on my unusual multi-cultural heritage, half Italian half Hong Kong-Chinese, I re-interpret cultural traditions, viewing Asian art through the perspective of both a cultural insider and observational voyeur.
I hope that when a viewer is able to take a step onto the stage of my painting, the narrative previously being formed through the recognizable will be slowly but surely undone. The backdrop becomes the actor, and the actor becomes the backdrop.
Bio
Born in Bronxville, half Hong Kong-ese and half Italian, Jeffrey Morabito spent his early years traveling between New York and Hong Kong. He returned to Asia in 2006, to apprentice with a calligraphy master in Seoul, South. Korea. This allowed Morabito’s painting to be reevaluated into its most basic elements of individual brush strokes. He then spent six years in Beijing, beginning with a Red Gate Gallery Residency, in 2009, teaching at Capital Normal University. Morabito returned to New York in 2016 to pursue an MFA at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, while also founding JMN Artists, a curatorial collective, which has produced three shows in New York.
Morabito has exhibited in “Art Beijing;” International Art Fair and Matthius Kupper Gallery, Beijing, China; N-Space and Jay Gallery Seoul, South Korea; Rosenfeld Gallery Philadelphia; Projektraum Knut Osper, Cologne, Germany; and in Eric Firestone Loft, SFA Projects and M.David & Co., New York. In 2019, he had a retrospective of his work entitled “Glossolalia” curated by Karen Wilkin at 1 GAP gallery. Morabito’s work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Hyperallergic, White Hot Magazine, Art Spiel, Youngspace, Deliciousline and China Daily. A recipient of the Art Cake Studio Program, he currently works in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
I place recognizable figures/objects into unrecognizable picture planes, and vice versa. By seeing objects as pictorial containers, such as vases with images, landscapes through windows, imagery in fashion, reflections in glass or airplane windows, I am able to make subversive paintings that question how we see and what we recognize.
It is important to create a space of exchange between the material object of the painting and the viewer. When the works are viewed from different distances, they move between surfaces you look at and surfaces you look through.
I amplify both visual and sensory juxtapositions that I normally see in the world. Heavy impasto paint says this is an object that can be touched and felt, while simple emblematic shapes says this is a flat shape while inferring the illusion of a portal to a different world.
By limiting the shapes I focus on – a circle, an x, parallel lines – I can focus on the qualities latent in the form. Much like the Enso circle in Japanese calligraphy, these attributes are simplicity, asymmetry, expediency, subtlety, and the absence of pretense.
My choice of subject is biographical, both in a cultural and arbitrary sense. In spirit of choosing subjects without any pretense, I pick topics I see on my daily bicycle commute to the studio; overpriced Avocado toast from the cafe where I get coffee, the complex yet mundane reflections I see in cars along the way. Drawing on my unusual multi-cultural heritage, half Italian half Hong Kong-Chinese, I re-interpret cultural traditions, viewing Asian art through the perspective of both a cultural insider and observational voyeur.
I hope that when a viewer is able to take a step onto the stage of my painting, the narrative previously being formed through the recognizable will be slowly but surely undone. The backdrop becomes the actor, and the actor becomes the backdrop.
Bio
Born in Bronxville, half Hong Kong-ese and half Italian, Jeffrey Morabito spent his early years traveling between New York and Hong Kong. He returned to Asia in 2006, to apprentice with a calligraphy master in Seoul, South. Korea. This allowed Morabito’s painting to be reevaluated into its most basic elements of individual brush strokes. He then spent six years in Beijing, beginning with a Red Gate Gallery Residency, in 2009, teaching at Capital Normal University. Morabito returned to New York in 2016 to pursue an MFA at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, while also founding JMN Artists, a curatorial collective, which has produced three shows in New York.
Morabito has exhibited in “Art Beijing;” International Art Fair and Matthius Kupper Gallery, Beijing, China; N-Space and Jay Gallery Seoul, South Korea; Rosenfeld Gallery Philadelphia; Projektraum Knut Osper, Cologne, Germany; and in Eric Firestone Loft, SFA Projects and M.David & Co., New York. In 2019, he had a retrospective of his work entitled “Glossolalia” curated by Karen Wilkin at 1 GAP gallery. Morabito’s work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Hyperallergic, White Hot Magazine, Art Spiel, Youngspace, Deliciousline and China Daily. A recipient of the Art Cake Studio Program, he currently works in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
STUDIO VISIT