The Museo Italo Americano [2], located within San Francisco’s Fort Mason center, has been one of the few institutions in California solely devoted to Italian and Italian-American art and culture since its inception in 1978. The upcoming exhibition, titled “Perspectives”, opens on Thursday January 18th features the recent work of three contemporary Italian-American artists, Gianluca Franzese [3], Marietta Patricia Leis [4] and Giuseppe Palumbo [5], who work with different media.

Three Unique Perspectives

Franzese, born in the southern Italian region of Calabria, studied painting at Pratt Institute [6] in New York City and has lived and worked in San Francisco for the past 14 years. The son of a jewelry maker and a pupil of the old Italian masters, Franzese started painting at a young age, moving through realist, expressive, and narrative styles. Franzese’s work is characterized by simple geometric forms and continuous patterns of color blended with metallic reflections, creating paintings that play with perspective.

In his own words, Franzese’s art “reflects my belief that beauty is a process that happens over time, with a focus on underlying patterns and geometries found in nature. The metallic elements in the pieces are sensitive to the temperature of the environment, expressing a particular temperament based on context. This responsive variable means that the work is always unique to the time and place in which it is viewed.” 

Marietta Patricia Leis was born in New Jersey and received an MFA in studio art from the University of New Mexico [7], Albuquerque, where she now lives and works. An avid traveler, Leis has visited places such as Thailand, Spain, Antarctica, Italy, Finland and Greece.  She is inspired by the variety of nature’s sceneries, lights and colors. She strives to portray this beauty in abstract terms, from very complex abstractions to reductive color fields, using several media, such as paintings, drawings, sculpture, and installation art.

Giuseppe Palumbo, the son of a professional artist from Italy, is a sculptor based between California and Colorado. He has studied at the Art Students League in Denver [8], The Loveland Academy of Fine Art [9] and the Scottsdale Artists School [10], as well as in San Miguel Allende, Mexico and Pietrasanta, Italy. 

He mainly uses bronze and specializes in fun, figurative and eccentric sculptures. In the form of dancing sheep, flying pigs, meditating bulls, walking seashells and little men balancing on a ledge, Palumbo gives form to human emotions as well as to social and political perspectives. His objective is “not to create a replica of the living, but to capture the essence of a being, not a frozen pose, but a sculpture alive in texture, spirit and warmth” Palumbo stated.

For more details on the exhibition click here>>> [2]