Bruno Gambone

Bruno Gambone was born in Vietri sul Mare (Salerno) in 1936. Since boyhood, at the beginning of the 1950s, he dedicated himself to pottery, gaining experience in the Florentine workshop of his father Guido, one of the greatest Italian potters of the 20th century. After working for Andrea d’Arienzo (1958), he began to experiment by working on fabrics and painting on canvas. The artist was to continue the two activities in parallel, going onto present his first solo painting exhibition at Galleria La Strozzina in Palazzo Strozzi in Florence at the end of the 1950s. 
In the early 1960s he set up in New York where he frequented the likes of Rauschenberg, Nevelson, Stella, Lichtenstein and Warhol. As well as painting and sculpture, he also worked in theatre and cinema. 
In this decade his work was presented in solo and group exhibitions both in Italy (among others, Galleria Il Chiodo, Palermo, 1966; Galleria del Cenobio, Milan; Mostra internazionale dei giovani, Milan, Turin, 1967; Oggi, Salone Annunciata, Milan, 1968) and abroad (Henry Gallery, Washington, 1964; Galeria Bonino, Rio de Janeiro, 1967; 30 artisti europei, Galleria M, Bochum, 1969).
His experimentation with materials, shapes, colours and decorations, increasingly present in his work in the late 1960s, was enriched by the experience he had gained in the 1950s. The “geometry of shape” influenced by the classical education he inherited from his father’s pottery, was replaced by a “perceptive, immaterial geometry” and the “idea” became the focal point of his work.
In 1968 he returned to Italy and moved to Milan, contemporary art’s chosen city, where he met and frequented the artists Castellani, Fontana, Scheggi, Bonalumi and Colombo.
The following year his father died and Gambone returned to Florence, devoting himself almost entirely to pottery. For twenty years he became involved in a series of exhibitions and took part in national (International Pottery Competition, Faenza, 1971 – ’72, ’74, ’77 – Venice Biennale, 1972; XV Milan Triennale, 1973; Mediterranean Pottery Competition, Grottaglie, 1979, Gallery, Bologna, 1985; Galleria Piaser, Turin, 1987; Galleria My Home, Albenga, 1988; Galleria L’Angololungo, Rome, 1990; Arte Fiera, Bologna, 1991; Galleria Fallani Best, Florence 1996) and international fairs (Munich fair, 1974; Silverberg Gallery, Malmö, 1975; Art Muddy, Tokyo, 1979; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982; Festival of Italian Design, Houston, 1983; III International Ceramic Festival, Mino, Japan, 1992).
At the same time, the artist did not fail to break out into other fields, in particular in the 1970s and 80s: glass, with some partnerships with the glass works in Colle Val D’Elsa and subsequently with laboratories in Venice, creating furnishings such as tables and lamps, and jewellery, designing pieces inspired by imaginary animals, the same ones that populated his pottery.
Bruno Gambone is part of the National Pottery Council and is a member of the Geneva Academy. For around a decade he has been the artistic director of the Vietri sul Mare National Pottery Prize. Numbering among his recent exhibitions are Donne Madonne e Sirene (Salerno, 2001), Corno d’Autore (Naples, 2001), Terra e Fuoco (Brussels, 2003), Metamorfosi di terra (Turin, 2007) and Sculture (Galleria Il Ponte, Florence, 2007).
From 2016 he started a collaboration for ceramic works with the Rossella Colombari Gallery in Milan.
In 2014, Il Ponte gallery organized the exhibition Objects 1965-1970, accompanied by the catalog with a text by Martin Holman and an interview with the master on his New York years by Carolina Orlandini, which marks the rediscovery of his paintings on shaped canvases. This was followed in 2016 by La valenza architettonica della pittura in the exhibition space of the Piasa auction house in Paris, in 2017 by Bruno Gambone & Herman Miller at the Frank Landau gallery in Frankfurt. In 2018 his works are presented in London by the 18 Davies Street Gallery and in the same year in Wien at the Kunstraum Baumgasse, 42/7, curated by Amir Shariat.
In 2020, Il Ponte gallery at the Art Fair in Bologna dedicated the stand to him together with Giulia Napoleone with a thematic exhibition on black and white. In the same year the gallery proposes its paintings in the online exhibition on Artsy Bruno Gambone. Shaped canvases 1970-1974.