JEFFREY MORABITO

2019 - 2021

Born in Bronxville, New York, Morabito spent his early years traveling between New York and Hong Kong. He returned to Asia in 2006 to apprentice with a calligraphy master in Seoul, South Korea. He spent six years in Beijing: at Red Gate Residency and teaching at Capital Normal University. In 2016, Morabito returned to New York to pursue an M.F.A. at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture while also founding JMN Artists, a curatorial collective.

In 2020, SFA Projects presented Jeffrey Morabito: Birds and Flowers, Vases and Windows. The same year, FOOD SHOW, a group exhibition co-curated by Morabito and Chantal Lee, was on view at SFA Projects in New York. The exhibition explored the relationship between people and food, and features nine new paintings of avocado toast made by Morabito.

“Each painting is made with the intention to question how we see, and what we recognize.

It is important for me to create a space of exchange between the material object of the painting and the viewer. When the works are viewed from different distances, they move between surfaces you look at and surfaces you look through.

By seeing objects as pictorial containers, I aim to emphasize the disorientation of what is inside, outside, far, close, clear, obstructed, real or fake.

I hope that if someone is able to take a step onto the stage of my painting, the narrative previously being formed through the recognizable will be slowly but surely undone. The backdrop becomes the actor, and the actor becomes the backdrop.

- Jeffrey Morabito

“Part of my studio practice when I come here everyday is, I make circles. Basically, it comes out of this very specific philosophy about nothingness in Taoism. Where, every time you make a circle if kind of helps you empty your mind.

Whenever I make a circle, one of two things happen: I’m either looking at an object, like a moon or a tennis ball, or I’m looking at a hole, some sort of window or an opening of a well. Automatically, your mind goes to other things from there. You have to have a very open mind to see what actually happens to the circle.”