The dueling worlds of Francesca DiMattio in ceramics, painting, and life upstate

By Jillian Scheinfield
Photography Christian Oth 
Creative Direction John Paul Tran
Styling Caitlyn Elizabeth Leary
Beauty Anjelica Moreno

Above: white cotton sleeveless topand white cotton pants by Suzanne Rae

An ideal day upstate for Francesca DiMattio includes the following: working on the land, sculpting in the studio, and going to Salvation Army.

For the 36-year-old artist, whose large-scale paintings and ceramic sculptures conjure up a jumbled universe of patched shapes and textures, thrift stores and their potpourri of knickknacks, oddities, and secret histories have long influenced how she thinks about her own work. 

“Formally, there are things tying it together,” she mused from the airy, two-year-old Hudson Valley studio she and her husband, fellow artist Garth Weiser, built from scratch. “But culturally it’s completely crazy — the jump from high to low, that sort of mashing everything together.”

With Fairway groceries and snow boots in tow, Francesca, Garth, and their 1-year-old son, Bruno, had just ventured upstate for a three-day stay when we spoke. “We’re up here three days a week, in the city three days a week, and have one day off,” she said. “I could never live up here full time. It’s really the duality that excites me.”

What fuels DiMattio’s artistic impulse is this very fascination with opposites — with chaos and order, grit and opulence. It’s a sensibility no doubt shaped by growing up in 1980s downtown Manhattan as the daughter of hardworking immigrants from Italy and Germany (her mother, a Russian ceramist, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany). In fact, she lived as a child on the basement floor of a Chelsea brownstone and now lives on the top floor of the same building — a rather apt metaphor. As she put it, “It’s a really simple, small brownstone with a lot of history.”

Above: cream dress by Electric Feathers, gold heels by Suzanne Rae, gold textured cuff by Aesa, earrings through out Francesca’s own

As a little girl, DiMattio spent time sketching in her parents’ country attic in Saugerties, New York. As an adult, she’s still drawn to the dim corners in life, figuratively speaking, that need sprucing up. She takes elements that are historically, culturally, and materially contradictory and interweaves conflict in a way that’s colorful, clashing, and mesmerizing. “What seems super different can be related,” she said. “I look for formal rhythms that can bring together differences into a new whole. Whether it be varying eras in history or totally different places on the globe — or simply something glossy next to something really matte. I look for ways to take really different references and find what connects them.”

It’s a point of view that manifests as paintings of incredible complexity, in which fragmentary architectural elements such as floors, porticos, and columns intersect in spatially impossible and confusing ways with furniture and objets, creating visual brainteasers that look not unlike shelves of thrift-store bric-a-brac overturned by a tornado. In a similar yet different vein, DiMattio’s ceramics are intricate assemblages of different pottery traditions that come out looking like colorful, twisted alien life forms. Her works have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, Salon 94, Blaffer Art Museum, and the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, among other global contemporary art venues.

“We’re up here three days a week, in the city three days a week, and have one day off… I could never live up here full time. It’s really the duality that excites me.”

Above: white cotton tee by Marques’Almeida, pants by Suzanne Rae; right: khaki twill jumpsuit by Sonia Rykiel,cream ribbed tank by Bailey 44

These days, as a new mother, she finds her meditations on notions of femininity and domesticity have been taking up a lot of mental space. “After having a baby last year, I have been thinking a lot about fertility figures, about the elasticity or new purposes of the body,” she explained. “I was surprised at how easily I handed over my boobs and body to a new function. It made me feel connected to a history of women who did this before, and very interested in the ways artists have depicted this shift in history.”

Inspired by Louis Bourgeois and Roman lactating fountains, DiMattio found that her own period of gestation led her to a new body of work she’s planning to show at Frieze New York with Salon 94. The series of totemic sculptures combines 19th-century porcelain references with Boucherouite (or Moroccan rugs) and Victorian furniture and exhibits the complicated contours and signifiers of feminine form and responsibility, with the end result being both gentle and edgy.

DiMattio’s new focus on the maternal is just the latest step in what seems to be a lifelong preoccupation. Even as a child, she was always attuned to what culture deems feminine versus masculine. “I’m a real little sister at heart,” she said. “Having an older brother growing up, I remember always wanting to stand up to him and be like him, but also not be like him. I didn’t want to ride motorcycles. I would try, and thought I did, but really I wanted to do other things and have those other things also be considered strong and tough.”

“I bought a weed whacker and a chainsaw and have a vegetable garden. It’s been really surprising to me how much you can reshape the way something looks.”

Above: white cotton tee by Marques’Almeida, right: cream wool top with embellishments and cream crepe pants by J.W. Anderson, sky blue leather clogs by A Détacher

That tension naturally found its way into her work. “I always wanted to make perverse things that exaggerate elements we see,” she continued. “Like floral patterns that may be on a girl’s skirt, but have it displayed on a much larger scale in a painting, where it actually starts to feel viral or aggressive.”

After 13 years of working in a space in Brooklyn with no windows or heat, Francesca and Garth took the plunge in 2015 and built two studios and a home up here. Inspired by a surplus of moving boxes and her neighbors’ Scottish troughs, she’s begun creating outdoor planters out of concrete, dirt, and perlite, garnished with shells. “I go back and forth with different interests, even things like sewing or household projects. I do a lot of activities, and they inform my life down the line,” she said.

Once a girl who wouldn’t leave the attic to play in the country sun, this city woman is now slowly finding herself turning into a bit of an outdoorsy frontierswoman. She remarked, “When we got this place, my parents couldn’t believe how much time I was spending outside. I bought a Weed Whacker and a chainsaw and have a vegetable garden. It’s been really surprising to me how much you can reshape the way something looks.”

Published in the print edition of the DVEIGHT, issue 6.