Mother of Pearl: Michael Lombardo

Cob Gallery is pleased to present the UK debut for Los Angeles based artist Michael Lombardo.

 

Michael Lombardo’s practice is grounded in a close attention to material culture and the visual languages of place. Born in Panama and raised in Oklahoma, his work moves between these geographies not as fixed identities, but as overlapping systems of memory, belief, and looking. Drawing from personal archives and lived experience, Lombardo paints objects that carry use and intimacy focussing on garments, textiles and other keepsakes - painted in careful detail to heightens their emotional and symbolic charge. Across his work, regional references from the American West and Great Plains are held in quiet dialogue with the devotional sensibilities of both the environment of Panama (such as conch shells) and his religious upbringing, producing images that hover between reverence and familiarity. Light, texture, and surface become primary tools through which Lombardo transforms everyday materials into sites of contemplation, where personal history and collective imagery intersect.

 

For Mother of Pearl Michael Lombardo presents a new body of paintings and drawings organised around fabric as both subject and surface. Born on December 12 - the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, commemorating the Virgin Mary’s miraculous appearance on cloth- Lombardo’s religious upbringing quietly informs the iconography and attentiveness of his work. Textiles recur not simply as objects of use, but as sites where belief, memory, and image converge. In several works, Oklahoma’s iron-rich red dirt is embedded directly into the surface, collapsing ground and figure, place and image, into a single plane.

 

A suite of small drawings, taken directly from Lombardo’s sketchbooks and framed to preserve the rounded edges of the pages, resists hierarchy, presenting the act of drawing as a quiet form of witness.

Paintings of pearl-snap cowboy shirts and band T-shirts - bearing country and western music icons - extend this logic of figuration through fabric. Enlarged and rendered with devotional care, these garments function as contemporary icons: images worn close to the body, where belief, identity, and longing are held in tension.

 

Across the exhibition, Lombardo situates figuration within the language of abstraction, allowing fabric - creased, folded, and marked by use - to become the site where the sacred and the everyday meet.