Orfeo Tagiuri Looked to Delinquency and Death for Latest Exhibition

LONDON — While Orfeo Tagiuri is all grown up now, he was once a mischievous schoolboy with a penchant for etching graffiti into any and every flat surface at his Catholic school. Building on his impish childhood acts, his latest exhibition, “The Great Bambino,” is on display at the Incubator Gallery until Sunday.

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Beyond being inspired by the follies of youth, the multidisciplinary artist’s latest body of work came as he was confronted by death.

The exhibition captures fragments of life frozen in time through wood carvings on stained birch planks — a hand with its fingers crossed, a leaf suspended mid-fall and a ballerina’s foot.

The recent death of Tagiuri’s uncle, a fellow artist who favored woodworking, shaped the exhibition.

The city of Boston, where he grew up, also inspired his work. He was fascinated with the superstitious sports curse allegedly placed on the Boston Red Sox after Babe Ruth, otherwise known as The Bambino, was sold by the team to the New York Yankees . For more than 80 years, the once-successful Red Sox failed to win any championships.

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“As a child, there was this curiosity over how one person could have such an impact on a city, an impact that transcended Ruth’s death by so many years,” Tagiuri said.

”The Great Bambino” is Tagiuri’s take on freezing death, figuratively and poetically.

What drives the artist’s creative process is his willingness to be mischievous.

“I think some part of that troublesomeness has remained with me. To be successfully naughty, you do have to have something switched on,” he said.

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