Description

We can't think of a better way to keep your favorite books company than with these bookends by Bruno Gambone. Who knew parrots could be so cute? Each one is subtly different than the other; one has a heart on his chest.  

Details

• Glazed white ceramic
• Signed on bottom
  
• 6 1/4"w x 5 1/2"d x 7 5/8"h
  
• Excellent condition

About the Artist

Bruno Gambone was born in Vietri sul Mare in 1936. In the early 1950s, when he was a teenager, he dedicated himself to ceramics, gaining experience in the Florence workshop of his father, Guido Gambone, one of the greatest Italian ceramists of the 20th century. Toward the end of the 1950s, he went on to work in Andrea d’Arienzo’s ceramic factory in Florence. Afterwards, he experimented with fabrics and painting on canvas, and presented his first solo painting exhibition at Galleria La Strozzina in Pallazo Strozzi in 1959.

In the early 1960s Bruno, like many of his generation, could not resist the call of New York.  During his stint in the city he met artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson and Andy Warhol, and continued his exploration in painting and sculpture, as well as theater and cinema. Eventually Gambone returned to Italy and settled in Milan. Upon his father’s death in 1969 he returned to Florence to assume the helm of his father’s ceramic studio and to re-commit himself almost entirely to ceramics.

But Bruno would put his own stamp on the studio’s output. He began to radically differentiate his work from his father’s and to focus on a “perceptive, immaterial geometry,” perhaps influenced by the memory of Rauschenberg’s and Stella’s art that so affected him in New York. He first experimented with an approach to a flat spatiality, and to renew the idea of decoration and painting, of modulation and modeling. By the mid-1970s, Gambone rejected the function of the “container” in ceramics, and instead brought his work closer to sculpture, as can be seen through his fantastic animals, whose first version was designed in the 1970s.

Bruno Gambone is a member of the Italian National Ceramics Council and of the Academy of Geneva. He served as President of CNA's ASNART (Italian Trade Association of Artistic Craftsmen) for ten years and today remains its Honorary President. In 1997 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Italian Ceramic Awards of Vietri sul Mare. His work has been the subject of major solo and international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in1972, the Museum of Modern Art in1982, the Festival of Italian Design in Houston in 1983, and a recent exhibit at the Italian Consulate in New York in 2020.