Olaf Gambini, the celebrated master of the Milan school of Nothingism spent much of his formative years as a street urchin in the poverty stricken region of Calabrese, after his parents were killed in a tragic gelato stand explosion.

As gambini tells it, "I was so poor that I used to sit at the back door of a local bakery, and wait until their closing time, when they would sweep up the shop floor. When the baker emptied his dustpan out the door, I would ravenously gourde myself on dusty bread crumbs!"

But Olaf was saved from this adversity, when local philanthropist and life-long bachelor, Gappeto Sphinctarri adapted the young Gambini as his protege.

again Gambini…

"Uncle Gappeto saved me from a life on the streets. He was so nice to me: He fed me, clothed me,…and even shared his bed with me, until I was, as he said, “too big for his britches”.

Thankfully before his imprisonment for pedaphelia, Sphinctarri gave young Gambini a scholarship into the Rome Academia de Artistica, where  Olaf quickly discovered his gift for art.

And it was there that he first came upon his formation of the Nothingist movement. Gambini whose own neurosis made him fall physically ill upon the sight of abstract expressionism, pop art and most other art for that matter, decided that the perfect art is art that is devoid of everything.

Gambini, ever the Iconoclast, gained notoriety by once gluing his hands to a wooden frame. He then walked around the city and stated he was “framing” the air molecules that proceeded him in order to “capture” the ethereal.

Almost immediately, art circles hailed him as a genius.

However Gambini also realized the foolishness of gluing one’s hands to a wooden frame in the now infamous and almost fatal, “Stall #3 incident.” and was derided in the local papers as "Glued hand GOOFBALL Trapped in Toilet for Week!”

The trauma from this experience pushed Gambini eastward in his quest for perfect Nothingism.

GAMBINI: "I traveled to the Tibetan Himalayas to study amongst the Zen Buddhist monks so that I might gain their concepts of nothingism and the world. Their powers of concentration amazed me! Together, we once stared for a week into our our empty rice bowls and contemplated the great void."

It took another week for the Tibetan Monks to notice Gambini sitting amongst a line of freshly potted shrubs.

After several more weeks, Gambini felt he completed his studies of the mystical ways of the Orient, and decided to return to Europe. Once there, He rented a picturesque artist’s loft in the epicenter of the art world: Paris’s left bank on the River Seine.

It was there that he pursued his art with renewed vigor. Gambini entered into what art historians now call his “few” period, when he was at his most prolific and churned out his best nothingist works such as the classic diptych, “White Cat Sleeping in a snowbank.” and its antithesis, “Black Cat Napping on a Coal Pile.”

And let us not for get the memorable “Empty paper Bags #1 – 99” or the mind boggling “Blank Ream Sheets #1-500”, and of course the Nothingist masterpiece, “Its not about the Thumbtack.”

All stupendous work. But Gambini is not without his controversy. He was once hired in “bold branding/marketing campaign.” He was once hired by a major corporation to redesign their packaging.  Gambini applied his Nothingist design ideals and created brilliant packaging: full of clean lines, artistic curves…

But also lacked ingredient and allergen information, which regrettably led to numerous accidently death lawsuits for the corporation.

In a press release from the time, Gambini declared, "My detractors are being a nit-picky-a whiners. Furthermore, how was I to know the company made not only dessert toppings, but the Toilet cleaner!"

But given these career ruining near misses, Olaf Gambini has prevailed. He managed to climb to the pinnacle of stardom at a young age. He was hailed as the pioneer of the Nothingist movement. The jet set and  pop stars took to his message of "devoid" of content like white on rice.

Gambini appeared numerous times on the talkshow circuit. He was weekly regular on the Merv Griffin show. (Years later, Merv confessed a profound love of the nothingist master.) Gambini as much as he hated his contemperies work, still managed to attend lavish parties throw by Warhol, Stella, and Rauchenberg.

Although there was that one time when Gambini threw up on Stella’s latest works at it’s premiere. Luckily for Gambini everyone just considered this to be another of his deep and insightful performence pieces.

Gambini was a rising young star in the art world. But his budding career was cut short in 1968 when Andy Warhol was shot.

Gambini, who shared the same barber as Warhol, let paranoia get the best of him and he mistakenly over-reacted. He thought all artists with white hair and bowl-cuts were targeted. This, regrettably, led Gambini to hide himself, and his art, away from the world for the next four decades.

Upon his years of solitude and isolation in the hills outside of Milan, Gambini came to the epiphany that the time was right for a re-emergence of nothingism. And where better to start re-invigorating his movement than at the renowned art capitol of the weird: Portland, Oregon, USA.

As he stated when he made his first press conference on the steps of the Milan Train station (to a bag porter, shortly before boarding the train to the airport.), "I have stared the Great Nothing in the face for the last 40 years, and it whispered back —Go West, Gambini!"

And so he concluded that his own weirdness would blend into that of Portland’s thereby making him less of a target for gunmen.

Huzzah Gambini!