Gabriella Gerbasi *28 October – 08 November 2026 * Under (Re)Construction

Curated by David Liss

Reception: Thursday 29 October at 6:30 p.m.

Gabriella Gerbasi’s exhibition Under (Re)Construction explores how femininity and sexuality have been shaped by popular culture and commercial imagery. Building on her earlier paintings examining the sexualized portrayal of female characters in video games, Gerbasi turns to vintage Playboy magazine advertisements to interrogate the relationship between the female body, desire, and consumerism.

Her process combines digital technology with traditional oil painting. She photographs selected advertisements from the magazines, digitally collages and manipulates them, using the resulting compositions as references for her paintings. By transforming images into layered, playfully re-imagined compositions, Gerbasi’s pictures subvert the commercial vocabularies and narratives of the original source images. As finished paintings they assert physicality and agency, answering only to their own pictorial logic without necessarily negating seductive, aesthetic experience.

Gabriella Gerbasi is a representational oil painter living and working in Toronto. She is a graduate of OCADU. Her practice draws from a vast archive of physical and digital media, blending magazines and video games as a way to observe the figure. Recent group exhibitions in Toronto include, Insert Here at X Space Cultural Centre in 2026, Under your Fingertips at Remote Gallery in 2025, and the Awesome Show at 163 Sterling Road in 2024.

David Liss is an independent curator, writer and artist living in Toronto. He was Director and Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (formerly MOCCA) from December 2000 through 2015, and Adjunct Curator and Advisor until 2020. From 1995 to 2000 Liss was Director and Curator of the Gallery of the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal. During the early 1990s he contributed art and music reviews to the Montreal Gazette, Vice, Canadian Art, and other publications. David has a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in painting, printmaking and art history.