Abbozzo Gallery
Abbozzo Gallery (Toronto)
Abbozzo Gallery is a Canadian Contemporary art dealer based in the west-end of Toronto, Canada. Abbozzo focuses on community based and collaborative programming, whose primary goal is fostering long-term success for their artists through local exhibition and presentations within global contexts. The gallery presents a thoughtfully curated program of local and international artists within contemporary paintings, prints, works on paper, and sculpture mediums. Known for its warm and inviting atmosphere, the gallery offers an accessible space for collectors, curators, and the broader public to encounter art through both emerging and established practices.
Proposal
Abbozzo Gallery presents a presentation of Kurdish-Canadian Roda Medhat and Barcelona based Gastón Lisak. Both repurpose, subvert, and re-imagine material and objects, altering their intended uses or expected representations. We aim to have a dialogue between Catalan and Kurdish-Canadian practices and approaches to object and material. Roda Medhat’s artwork is interested in the translation of textiles into contemporary sculptural forms. Medhat utilizes industrial materials like neon, steel, and inflatables to rethink the weight and permanence of cultural artifacts. Dr. Gastón Lisak is a conceptual artist whose works reimagine the relation between subjects (us) and everyday material objects using industrial processes.
Dr. Gastón Lisak (b. 1989) is a Barcelona-based conceptual artist whose works reimagine the relation between subjects (us) and everyday material objects using industrial processes. His works are largely inspired by Material Anthropology and the Italian Arte Povera movement lead by Michelangelo Pistoletto. His most well-known series of works include Sacred Plastics, Arqueologia Mundana, Totems of Today, and Lossless.
He is a co-founder of Random Happiness, a creative movement that embraces happiness as a revolutionary tool for social change. He is also the curator of the Institute of Mundane Archaeology. IOMA serves as an archive, research, and publishing network for investors, artists, and schools.
Lisak holds a Higher Graduate Degree in Design from ELISAVA and a BA (Honors) in Graphic Arts from the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Upon graduation, he was awarded a grant at FABRICA, the Benetton Group’s research center in Italy, where he refined his skills in visual storytelling and pop-up exhibitions. He currently holds a PhD in Design at the Faculty of Architecture in Lisbon, focusing his research on the anachronistic object as a tool to understand society.
He has been teaching at ELISAVA for over a decade, leading workshops in Art Thinking, collective creation, and co-creation. He has given talks and workshops at LaSALLE University (Jakarta), Tate Modern, Tilburg University (Holland), and the Design Museum of Barcelona among others.
Gastón Lisak’s work has been exhibited at major venues including Tate Modern (UK), Gallery Bensimon (Paris), Beijing Design Week, Times Square (New York), Salone del Mobile (Milan), The Aram Gallery, CCCB (Barcelona), ILIVE TOMORROW Gallery (Hong Kong), and MNAC (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya).
Marisa Müsing is a transdisciplinary artist and cyber thinker exploring relationships between the body, digital identity and archaeological history, expressing ethereal feminist ideals through digital and sculptural media. Their PhD at the Royal College of Art reinvestigates Pompeiian frescoes through a queer cyberfeminist lens. They have exhibited work at the Royal Academy of Arts, the British Academy, Salone del Mobile, New York Design Week, SOFTER, Ethereal Maison, Restless Egg and Xpace Cultural Centre, and have been featured in Glitch Magazine, Digital Frontier, Hypebae, WGSN, Dezeen, Vogue and the New York Times. Marisa has lectured at institutions including the RCA Research Biennale Symposium, Parsons School of Design, Harvard GSD, Rhode Island School of Design and ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and
Engineering.
Additionally, Marisa runs two collaborative studios. müsing-sellés, a globally-recognised design and teaching studio engaged in the transformation of object and spatial design through architecture; and mamumifi, a multidisciplinary collective that explores building stories around identity through objects from mixed-asian female perspectives.
