Gabriele Cappelli (b. 1972 Forli, Italy) discovered art at a young age. Frequent trips to Rome to visit his grandfather, an architect and designer, brought him into contact with painting, an experience that is still a central part of his practice as an artist. Cappelli moved to London in 1997 and it was here that he decided to pursue his work as an artist, inspired by the YBA movement. Theory and dexterity has always gone together in Cappelli’art. Cadogan has represented Gabriele Cappelli for over ten years. His work is collected widely and is held in private collections in the UK, Europe and the US.

Gabriele Cappelli’s use of pure unadulterated oil paints lends richness to the combinations of soft and bold colours in his compositions, often layered with gold dust thus adding to the intense paints. His paintings have a true smoothness to their surface and yet within this, the labour and patience of the artist is still expressed in the brushstrokes evident on close looking. The artist thus creates depth from the flatness of the canvas, asserting the materiality of the artwork itself. Sensation is expressed as the first step of a complex process.

Clean and powerful, Gabriele Cappelli’s abstract geometric forms bring together a sense of classical aesthetic and a contemporary approach to colour and line. His artworks contain an inherent sense of balance in their proportion, form and colour, distilling a universal aesthetic language into its purest form. Cappelli has always been interested in the dialogue between different disciplines, in both theory and technique his works encapsulate the harmony the artist has found between the past and present. He is able to recall historical artistic traditions through abstract and modernist shapes and textures, re-evoking and revitalising them by combining them with conceptual and visual proponents of contemporary art. Cappelli takes inspiration from architecture and urban planning but also from the structure of music, using these disciplines to inform the development of his works in creating a sense of order.