READING, PA.- Albright College’s
Freedman Gallery will display artwork by D. Dominick Lombardi from Oct. 27-Dec. 8. The artist will give a free virtual lecture about his process and artistic practice on Thursday, Oct. 27, 4 p.m. Pre-registration is required. A free reception to view the Freedman Gallery exhibition will be held on Sunday, Oct. 30, 2-4 p.m.
A visual artist, curator and prolific art critic, Lombardi most recently was published in The Brooklyn Rail and Art and Antiques magazine, and formerly served as an art critic for the New York Times from 1998 to 2005. Lombardi’s curatorial practice includes ongoing partnerships with the Morean Art Center, St. Petersburg, Fla., and Hampden Gallery, Amherst, Mass.
As a visual artist, Lombardi has shown extensively across the world in solo and group shows, and is currently represented by Artego gallery in Queens, NY and the Prince Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark. His work is firmly rooted in Pop Surrealism, and his 45-year retrospective High + Low just completed its national tour.
The exhibition at the Freedman includes a newer body of work that reuses and recycles older paintings, drawings, sculptures and mixed-media compositions, updating them and turning them into unique collages by strategically incorporating his smaller drawings that he has transformed into stickers and affixed to the original works. He has also given the same treatment to vintage record album covers. He refers to the whole series as Cross Contamination With Stickers. The cross contamination of media, with drawing as the basis for both, offers an interesting dialogue between old and new, progress and tradition, and practice of form versus comic illustration.
“We are extremely thrilled to finally host a solo exhibition by artist D. Dominick Lombardi,” said David Tanner, Albright’s dean of arts and cultural resources. “As a well-respected critic and writer, he has worked with us in the past, providing insightful written critiques that were published in our exhibition catalogs, most recently the solo exhibition by artist and faculty member Matthew Garrison. It is particularly interesting and meaningful to see Dominick’s own work in-person in the gallery this time.”
The gallery has published a free tri fold with photos of Lombardi’s artwork and a critical essay by Joel Carreiro, an artist, writer and professor at Hunter College. In Carreiro’s essay The Well Bred Hybrid, he states: “In Lombardi’s collage and assemblage works vigorous formal mixing mobilizes the artistic fuel necessary to investigate a big ticket item - no less than what used to be referred to as “the human condition”.”
“What is it that we are? How do we build a self and determine our actions and beliefs?
What access do we have to the reality of our environment - both internal and external?”
“Mining the collective unconscious, he layers discordant imagery such as figure drawings, themselves efforts at “high art”, with floating signifiers from the nether world of dreams, racing thoughts and hallucinations. Set against activated paint backgrounds, these elements interact in a sort of parallel play, inciting each other and sparking the proverbial Surrealist jump in order to reveal the uncanny within the familiar.”
“In addition to formal contamination the title also points to the literal poisoning of our environment through pollution, of our bodies through transgenic foods and our minds through apocalyptic pressures. Just as Picasso’s figural distortions evoked the horrors of war in his painting Guernica, an early and formative influence, Lombardi`s anatomical grotesqueries and mutations reflect our absurd flirtation with global destruction.
His tragicomic hybrids wander hyperspace like cyborgs, surrounded by their indecipherable thought bubbles - ad hoc survivors of a consumer society with nothing left to consume. This seriously bad news is leavened with humor and wit. Against the failed state of humanity he offers the high octane capacity of his protagonists to reinvent themselves from its toxic residue.”
“Their resilience and ingenuity exemplify essential attributes, found in short supply today, that will be crucial for human survival and renewal.”
The Freedman Gallery’s general hours of operation are Tuesday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays, 1-4 p.m. Free parking is available in the college’s main parking lot, on the corner of 13th and Bern streets.
Named a top national college by Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education, Albright College (founded 1856) is home to a diverse community of learners who cultivate integrity, curiosity, connection and resilience.
