Christopher Gambino (b. 1996, New York) is an artist based in New York and New Haven. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Thorn Stigmata and the Faded Branch of the Crown at Pangée (Montréal, 2026); The Christmas Show at Below Grand (New York, 2025); Puqpa at Weatherproof (Chicago, 2025); and Who Shot Candy Warhol? at Horse Room (Worcester, MA, 2024). His sculptures mine the relationship between the viewer and the art object to explore theatricality, abjection, and the inherent violence of the gaze.
Your sculptures and objects have a strong sense of „elegance“ to them. What do the curve and the pointed shoe represent for you?
My materials are all trash, but I love decorative flourishes. There’s something beautiful and doomed to me about a Regency floral motif or a Neo-Victorian cabriole leg on something that is essentially worthless. These flourishes are meant to signal taste or class but fail miserably in a way that I find relatable- the materials are things pretending to be other things, better things. As for the shoes, I don’t know; I like shoes, I guess.
There is a strong presence of a person within your work; do you feel it, and how would you explain it?
My work is ultimately about personifying objects. I work mainly with household furniture, which obviously already has a relationship to the body. Weirdly, the things we use with our bodies have forms that replicate our bodies’ shapes. I’m not sure why a chair needs to have slender wrists or a curve at the ankle or an arched back for it to read as “functional” or “comfortable.” There’s something about the fact that the closer these objects get to representing the body, the more desirable they become. It’s a reverse uncanniness or something. The act of purposefully breaking or disfiguring something that represents the home or the self is pretty straightforwardly destabilizing the viewer’s relationship to it. When these objects are then dressed up to look like people, there’s now a sense that the object is having an experience of the viewer at the same time the viewer is having an experience of it. With my work, I hope to use the marks of everyday use on these domestic objects to reveal similar marks within the viewer somehow as well.
89 × 166 × 56 cm, Photo: Atlas Documentation, courtesy of Pangée
You work mainly in wood; how do you find and select your materials?
They are all sourced from the street, the free section of Craigslist, estate sales, and eBay. I originally started working with these materials mostly because they’re cheap and easy to find, but as the practice has evolved, I’ve realized that it’s important to me that the things I work with have all been deemed by their previous owners to not have retained their market values or functions. These objects all bear the traces of the ways that they were used and of the people they were used by. I’m interested in the narrative potential of these traces, and in the new narratives that can be unraveled by using them as a starting point.
Is there something you collect?
Is there an archive of all the high heels you draw from, or do you find them specifically for each work? I honestly just search “high heels lot” on eBay, set the maximum price to $30, and buy kind of whatever. There are forty used pairs of shoes in my studio right now. I don’t like sourcing materials with specific projects in mind. I like to sit with my things and give them time in the studio to reveal what form they’ll take when they’re ready.
How important is detail in your work: a crystal, a brand name written on the sole of a shoe? What role do they play?
The individual elements of my works or exhibitions are often anachronistic with each other. A chair from the 1980s that’s supposed to look like it’s from the 1890s wearing a pair of shoes that are from the 1990s that are supposed to look like they’re from the 1910s on top of a tablecloth that is ostensibly contemporary but evoking the 1940s, or something. All of these signifiers kind of collapse in on themselves and just become this vague impression of old-ness. I like that the work exists sort of outside of time. When I make my work and when I’m sourcing my materials, I feel like I’m taking on this attic- or basement-dwelling character who has access to all of these things that have been forgotten or abandoned by other people over the course of decades and decades. The presence of a brand name or crystal embellishment on a shoe helps with that specificity, but I think it’s funny to show an artwork that says ESCADA on it.
Do you prefer chaos or order? Is there order within chaos?
There’s room for both. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell based on my craftsmanship, but I spend a lot of time on my work. I saw my furniture into pieces and sew them into their stockings slowly and carefully. I try to approach the actual production of the work in as measured and specific a way as I can, because I know my actual skills as a craftsperson are such that it’ll look insane regardless. The visible presence of a maker’s hand can be a part of a work’s content, and maybe mark-making can be used as a storytelling device. The raw edge on a sawed-off piece of wood can make it clear that the job was done intentionally but without proper technique, and I think that can add a whole new layer of meaning and meta-narrative to a piece. I guess order helps contextualize the chaos inherent to my process (or makes excuses for it, depending on who you ask).
Christopher Gambino – www.christophergambino.com, www.instagram.com/christophergambino/
Christopher Gambino’s work has recently been exhibited at Amity (Los Angeles, 2026); Blue Velvet (Zurich, 2026); Isolde (New York, 2026); Ortega y Gasset Projects (New York, 2026); and Spielzeug (New York, 2025), among others.
