Mark Gibian

Biography

Mark Gibian studied sculpture and art history at Cornell University, graduating in 1979, after time at Brown University and a year of study in Barcelona on a Cornell fellowship. He fabricates his own work, heating, bending, cutting, hammering and grinding industrial materials until they take on curving, organic forms. The results are abstract but suggest growth, motion and the body.

Much of his career has been in public art. His commissions include 'S' (1982) at SUNY Cortland; 'Cable Crossing' (1997), a cable installation for the MTA in the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall subway station; 'Shelter' (1993–94) for the Center for Fine Arts in Miami; 'Crescendo' (2008), stainless steel structures on the North Fifth Street pier in Williamsburg; the vine-covered 'Serpentine Structures' in Hudson River Park; and 'Vortex' (2016) in Anchorage, Alaska. He has held residencies at Sculpture Space in Utica, Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic, and the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts in Miami, and received a Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation grant in 2004.

His work is in the collections of the Jewish Museum in New York, the Johnson Museum at Cornell and Vanderbilt University, among others. He has exhibited regularly with the Anita Shapolsky Gallery and internationally in Spain, the Netherlands and the Dominican Republic. At Holland Tunnel Newburgh he showed in a 2021 exhibition with Joel Carreiro and Sarah Walker, and in 2025 contributed rusted-steel works including 'Kabuki' to 'Reclamation.'

Practice. Abstract, organic sculpture fabricated by hand from steel, stainless steel, cable, glass and wood, from monumental public commissions to kinetic and functional pieces; also watercolors, monoprints and drawings.