Hal Bromm
90 West Broadway, 2nd floor
New York, NY, 10007
+1 212-732-6196
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Hal Bromm
90 West Broadway, 2nd floor
New York, NY, 10007
+1 212-732-6196
Join our mailing list
Open Tuesday-Saturday 12-5; always by appointment
January 15th-Feberuary 28th 2026
Luis Frangella: On Paper Opening reception January 15th 6-8:00pm
Hal Bromm Gallery is pleased to present Luis Frangella On Paper, an exhibition of the late artist’s charcoal works from the 1980s. The exhibition will be on view January 15 - February 28, 2026. An opening reception will be held January 15, 6-8pm.
Frangella’s practice as an artist bridged the ordered sensibility born out of his training as an architect and visual researcher with the energy of neo-espressionism of the 1980s east village. After graduating with a degree in architecture from the University of Buenos Aires, Frangella moved to Cambridge to pursue Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. It was there that his work began to shift into the realm of visual-arts, creating a series of installations exploiting trompe l’oeil to induce the metamorphosis of familiar forms. This theme of ‘metamorphosis’ continued to be present in his work, even as the format evolved from the conceptually driven sculpture and installation of the mid 1970s to the more broad and expressive figuration of the 1980s. Though some of the works in this exhibition were maquettes of larger scale paintings, Frangella often treated these charcoal sketches as works unto themselves. Born out of his visual research conducted during his time at MIT, Frangella created these series of drawings as a way of mapping not only the spatial aspects of his subject matter, but how they shift over time, seeking to capture the way his subjects would transform from one state to another.
Though he ultimately moved away from architecture, his work maintained some elements the discipline, made apparent through “the exact measurement of space, in the basic grid, and in the appreciation of all stages of the creative process, from the final work to the sketch”. Those who knew Frangella spoke to the obsessive nature of his creative process, analyzing every dimension of his subject matter through meticulous studies while incorporating elements of chance. Stripping back color and scale allows these pieces to highlight Fragnella’s technical abilities, the undercurrent of classicism beneath his more expressionist work. The abstracted figures of disembodied heads and torsos that are most often cited to characterize his work are born out of a meticulous study and appreciation for the fundamentals of form. In 1993, artist and critic Walter Robinson recalled how “[Frangella] made little models of torsos and heads out of clay, and then used them as models for huge pictures. He also made exquisite volumetric studies of heads and torsos out of welded wire, spare and delicate and exact, like 3-D drawings in space. He told me he made them to study a thing's form, so he could paint it. He could draw incredibly. The form would fill up around these simple lines”. These terracotta figures became the first point in a series of transmutations leading to the renderings on paper shown in this exhibition. These works are the product of a ‘metamorphosis’ of the same form between various dimensions, with the grid anchoring this continual process of re-abstraction within a more traditional visual language.