Nicola Florimbi Rooms

Press Release

Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present Nicola Florimbi, Rooms. This selection of new paintings is the gallery's first exhibition with the artist.

In Nicola Florimbi's paintings, domestic interiors are transformed into staged environments, solemn spaces of power and intrigue, where exterior views appear sometimes vertiginously close, a mere step or two away from ritual interactions enacted by expressionless figures. These players and the curiously still moments in which they are suspended circumvent clear narrative, their distant gazes trapping tropes of family and school like bees in amber. Drawing on traditions of still life, genre painting, and psychological realism, Florimbi's canvases include references – both direct and oblique – to other artists, from Pieter de Hooch and Jean-August-Dominique Ingres to Balthus and Christina Ramberg. A kind of social geometry is plotted in these scenarios, relationships organized as positions in space, the incarnation of a system of power and knowledge, emotional inflection provided by means of a painterly hand.

Nicola Florimbi (b. 1994) received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied at Rhode Island School of Design and Otis College of Art and Design. She has participated in numerous group shows, most recently Master Class, Secrist/Beach, Chicago. Rooms is Florimbi's solo debut.

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