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Palazzo Gagliardi will host, from 6 December to 6 January, «Organic Forms», Cosma Bompasso’s personal exhibition. The master hair stylist from Vibo, with a forty-year career between Rome and European stages, presents to the public of his city a corpus of ceramic sculptures that dialogue with the great tradition of organic sculpture of the twentieth century. The vernissage is scheduled for Sunday 6 December at 6pm, with free admission. The initiative enjoys the patronage of the Municipality of Vibo Valentia, Department of Culture led by Stefano Soriano.
A path outside the box
Bompasso arrives at the sculpture from a little-traveled road. His work as a hair stylist, carried out for decades on the most important squares and stages in Italy and Europe, taught him to think in terms of volumes and proportions on a living material. In February 2025 he brought his business back to Vibo Valentia with ArtHairGallery, in via Terravecchia Inferiore, a hybrid between salon and gallery where clay sculptures and oil paintings coexist with daily work. «Organic Forms» takes that research out of the studio and entrusts it to an institutional space in the city.
The biomorphic lesson
The most immediate reference is biomorphic sculpture, the line that from Jean Arp onwards has sought a vocabulary for abstraction in the forms of nature. Bompasso’s works start from closed and full volumes, smoothed by hand to resemble river stones. Stems and plant elements are grafted onto these bodies which seem to push from within, and the tension between the stillness of the archetype and the movement of growth becomes the true subject of the work.
The technique remains faithful to the most ancient craftsmanship. The clay is refractory and Calabrian, the modeling entirely manual. The surfaces are treated with ivory engobe and oxide-based enamels and undergo a double firing, at 980 and 1020 degrees. Each piece bears the author’s signature engraved in the still raw clay.
«The Birth», the manifesto work
The centerpiece of the exhibition is «La Nascita», a polychrome ceramic from 2024, a single piece measuring 40 centimeters high and 20 centimeters wide. An ivory-colored ovoid bulb opens into a bundle of thin stems that fade from powder blue to cooked orange, with pigments fixed in the second firing. It is the image chosen to represent the exhibition and condenses its poetics, in which the full form retains the material and life still finds a way out.
An appointment for the city
With the holidays as a backdrop, the exhibition enriches the cultural calendar of Vibo Valentia and brings attention to an artist who, after a long career away from home, has chosen to invest in his own land. The vernissage on Sunday 6 December at 6pm will be an opportunity to meet Cosma Bompasso among his works.