JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 photographic works, generally framed in aluminum and unmatted, and hung against white walls (and the gallery windows) in the smaller back gallery space. (Installation and detail shots below.)

The following works are included in the show:

• 5 tissue paper, inkjet, acrylic medium, backboard, yupo paper, aluminum frame, acrylic glass, 2024, sized roughly 43×32 inches, unique
• 1 tissue paper, inkjet, acrylic medium, backboard, yupo paper, aluminum frame, acrylic glass, inkjet on archival baryta paper, sunglass lens, 2024, sized roughly 29×22 inches, unique
• 1 acrylic medium, inkjet, tissue paper (installed on windows), 2024, sized roughly 68×51 inches, unique

Comments/Context: Gritty urban surfaces are a constant source of authentic visual inspiration for photographers of all kinds. Seen through the cropping and flattening eye of a camera, the junk collecting in the gutter, the cracks in the sidewalk, the peeling posters on a plywood construction fence, and the washes of gestural graffiti on passing walls offer seemingly endless opportunities for pulling unexpectedly lyrical abstraction out of the everyday fabric of the city.

But this kind of seeing has been done so many times before, and done so memorably by countless photographic masters, that even though these surfaces are consistently aesthetically seductive, the harder artistic challenge really becomes not so much to see these textures in the first place, but to transform them into something altogether new and unique. Decades ago, it was enough to see these surfaces with rich black-and-white crispness and present them as found Abstract Expressionism; today, while that kind of approach is still possible, most tactile visual discoveries aren’t so much an end point for a contemporary photographer as a place to begin an onward artistic journey. Now armed with powerful digital manipulation tools and printing technologies that provide far more flexibility in terms of substrate and surface than ever before, photographers are often using urban imagery as the malleable raw material for increasingly complex (and inspired) process-driven investigations.

From afar, Sofia Sinibaldi’s recent works present as elegantly involved color abstractions, perhaps made with some combination of paint, silkscreen, and Rauschenbergian image transfer. But up close, an altogether different reality is revealed – enlarged photographic images printed on extremely thin nearly transparent sheets of tissue paper, which have then been affixed to (and sealed on) both sides of clear acrylic glass sheets, creating two intimately overlapped layers of imagery that are combined into single integrated artworks.

Apparently, as the artist has wandered through New York, she has toted not only her camera but a portable flatbed scanner, which she has used to either photograph or directly scan the city. Her images were then brought back into a lightbox-style digital realm, where they were tweaked, enlarged, relayered, and otherwise massaged, ultimately creating the imagery printed on the front and back sheets. Here and there, there are hints and echoes of identifiable objects – a bus, a taxi in traffic, some coins, fragments of letter forms, sprocket holes from film, some curves of ironwork, remnants of tape, some drawn arrows – but these seem to be deliberately pushed to the edge of legibility, as though recognizing them isn’t really the point. When placed in the context of drips, scars, gestural marks, tears, imperfections, and other enlarged flares and color fields (some like gritty halftone dots), and then sandwiched and synthesized together into shifting coexistence with still other images and textures, these snippets of identifiability seem to wash away, fronting more formal concerns.

Sinibaldi’s various processes bring an immediacy back to this kind of urban imagery. Her works reward nose to frame looking, where the seams of the tissue paper, the undulations of the clear acrylic coating, and the depth of the two layers (created by the thin front/back distance) become more apparent, and the enlargements of once identifiable textures dissolve into waves of stain and implied grit. Colors drift and break down, and photographic textures are unraveled, to the point that they feel ephemeral and fleeting. Geometries of circles, triangles, and intersecting lines anchor the compositions, only to be interrupted by the unruly uncontrolled energy of the city.

Two additional works extend some of these ideas in adjacent directions. In one, Sinibaldi affixes her images to the paned windows of the gallery space (instead of an acrylic glass substrate), allowing the gridded glass, the iron security bars, and the view into the brick interior courtyard to become part of the work. This adds even more layers of depth and geometry, and activates the composition (which has ironwork as one of its visual components) with the changing light conditions outside. In another, she introduces physical collage elements to the surface of her work, adding a bagged image of zippers and a loose red sunglass lens to the interplay of shapes and colors. In both cases, Sinibaldi is extending beyond the limits of the frame, drawing on other elements to expand the compositional possibilities.

This small exhibit is a visceral example of why we all need to go to galleries and see artworks in person rather than simply ingesting them off the Internet – these montaged works have much more tactile richness and complexity up close and in person than any installation images (however well executed) could ever really communicate. Sinibaldi’s works have bold heft and thickness, and then surprise us with their hand crafted delicacy, and it is this shifting, uneasy quality that I found most engaging. Sinibaldi has found some unexpected methods for turning urban surfaces into filtered transparencies, thereby unlocking a piled-up sense of additive visual accumulation that feels fresh.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced at $4500 and $6500 based on size. Sinibaldi’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.