Y Gallery is pleased to announce G.T. Pellizzi’s first New York solo exhibition. Transitional examines changes within the geometries of our physical and social environment and the impact these changes have on our formal and cultural vocabularies. The show marks a shift in Pellizzi’s artistic trajectory after years working collectively.

New York is both the stage and the subject for G. T Pellizzi’s new body of work. The city has been a source of inspiration for many artists, such as in Piet Mondrian’s consecutive series, spanning from New York City to Broadway Boogie Woogie. Barnett Newman’s seminal work, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue and Flavin’s Primary Picture, both reflect how Mondrian’s vision shifts though one generation to the next. As a foundational ground for many artistic movements and innovations, New York City is a stage for these constant cultural transitions. Like a theatre set the very physicality of the city and its real estate developments are constantly in shift as well.

As a center of the global economy, New York is also living a moment of uncertainty. After the economic crisis, largely instigated by the real estate market, and as we come to the ten-year anniversary of the collapse of the twin towers, New York finds itself rebuilding at ground zero, looking to the future, and reconstructing its psyche.

By assimilating the vocabulary of construction sites, Pellizzi’s exhibition makes New York’s ever shifting nature one of its main themes. He appropriates, almost in an objet trouvé style, some of the most ubiquitous visual vocabularies and objects that inflect our daily navigation of the city. The temporary structures and surfaces of solid color (yellow and blue) that frame and mask real estate developments and city projects, inevitably become signifiers of obstruction, struggle, power, profit, and progress. These structures are what Pellizzi describes as “transitional geometries”—geometries that conceal the content and protect the viewer/public from what lies behind their surfaces.

Continuing his interest in pedagogy, Pellizzi playfully interlaces the histories of the Dadaist readymade, Neo Plasticism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, even touching on “dematerialization” by hinting that the real work is hidden behind the objects on display. The work also brings forth playful relationships between figure and ground, by literally separating the two and putting the latter on the floor; turning one into a volume and the other into a plane. Light and color are ubiquitously present, as are conduits and channels, reflecting structures of the everyday while also creatively sampling some of our biggest preoccupations within artistic practices of our time.

Sue Leponte, NYC 2011

Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi (G.T. Pellizzi) was born in 1978 in the state of Morelos, Mexico. He studied philosophy at St Johns College and is a graduate from The Channin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. From 2001-2011, Pellizzi co-founded and has been involved in various art collectives, with whom he has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, PS1 Moma, Centre Pompidou, PAC Murcia, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and various art galleries in New York, Zurich, Berlin and London. Currently he collaborates with several characters of his own making in the guise of different personalities, of which G.T. Pellizzi is one. Pellizzi lives between New York and Mexico. He is currently in transition.