William Gambini was born in 1918 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1950's, as a member of the New York School of Painting, his involvement in organizing the 10th Street Cooperative Gallery Movement gained him major recognition. Gambini was with the March Gallery until 1960, when it disbanded.
Gambini's circle of friends included legendary painters like: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson, Joan Mitchell, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb. The important writer and critic of the day, Harold Rosenberg, recognized Gambini as "one of the most promising young painters who would become an inheritor of Abstract Expressionism." - Art News Annual, 1959.
In 1975, Gambini received the Mark Rothko Foundation Grant and moved to San Diego, California. He continues to maintain a rigorous schedule of painting and sculpting in his North Park studio. In 1999, he was awarded the prestigious Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant.
"Drawing and painting ... are intimately connected because I believe the "ACT" of expression of line, shape, contour, form, object, sound, and silence, with their relationship of the space on the flat surface, together with color definitions, such as hues, darks, lights, and implemented in pencil, pen, brush, ink, crayon, charcoal, or pigment, as desired by an individual's act, expresses the visual all at once, and becomes a "unity of the whole"."
"Painting for me is a visual experience; a learning process of life and living. I do not have a technique; instead, I use a method which I have developed over the years. The arrangement of configurations, with pigment and color placed on the flat 2-dimensional canvas surface, creates light in time and space without shadows, modeling or perspective."
"My thoughts and feelings are to create a vast climactic, mystic, peripheral condition on the canvas surface by controlling and balancing opposing forces to create a unity of events relating them in time and space." -William Gambini
cv/exhibitions
ART STUDIO CLASSES + STUDIES:
1939-43 CCNY, BA
1946-48 Amede Ozenfant, New York City
1948-49 Brooklyn Museum Fine Arts School, New York City
1949-50 Esmerelda Fine Arts School, Mexico City
1949-51 New School for Social Research, New York City
1950-51 Art Students League of New York City, New York City
ASSISTED:
1949-50 Diego Rivera, Mexico City (murals)
1949-51 Saul Baizerman, New York City (sculpture)
MURAL + CONSTRUCTION COMMISSIONS:
1954 Berglihof Junior College, Lower Salem, OH
1990 First Lutheran Church, San Diego, CA
VISITS:
1942-43 E. Hemingway, Havana, Cuba
1945 P. Picasso, Paris, France
ASSOCIATIONS:
Tenth Street Co-op Gallery Movement; Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Hofmann, Gottlieb, Kline, Rothko, among others
SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
1952 ROKO Gallery, Oils, New York City
1958 March Gallery, Oils, New York City
1960 March Gallery, Drawings, New York City
1962 Bleecker Street Gallery, Drawings, New York City
1962 East Hampton Gallery, Oils, New York City
1963 East Hampton Gallery, Oils, Long Island, New York
1964 Brooklyn Museum Fine Arts School, Oils, Brooklyn
1964 Mari Gallery, Oils, Woodstock, New York
1966 Mari Gallery, Oils, Woodstock, New York
1969 Lafayette Art Center, Oils, Indiana
1979 Adler Gallery, Acrylics, Los Angeles, California
1981 Installation Gallery, Acrylics, Los Angeles, California
1982 T.H. Neumaier Gallery, Works on Paper, San Diego, California
1983 T.H. Neumaier Gallery, Acrylics, San Diego, California
1992 B Street Gallery, Acrylics, San Diego, California
1994 B Street Gallery, Acrylics, San Diego, California
2003 Earl + Birdie Taylor Library, Paintings + Construction, San Diego, California
MAJOR EXHIBITIONS:
Spoleto, Italy
University of Massachusetts
Whitney Annual
Guggenheim Museum
Houston Museum
Norfolk Museum
Museum of Modern Art
Tougaloo College
bibliography
The Artists Almanac
The Artist World, Fred McDarrah
Artists of Greenwich Village, Fred McDarrah
From A Diary of What People Really Said, Seymour Krim
Tenth Street Days, Co-Ops of the 50's, Joellen Bard
Catalogs:
University of Massachusetts (front cover)
Magazines:
Art News
Art News Annual 1959, Harold Rosenberg
Cue
New Yorker
Contact 5 "A Portfolio of American Drawings", V. Zabriske
San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles, October 1994
Newspapers:
The New York Times, "Artists' Lives", Nan Robertson
The Village Voice, "East 10th Street Artists"
Sunday New York Times Art Section, Howard Devree
Art Students League News: A Profile by L. Campbell
Videos:
Intervals with Time + Space, Icon Productions
Gambini - Portrait of a Painter, Icon Productions
Profile - Rick Bollinger, San Diego City TV 24, 2003
