The Roberto Alban Art Gallery has the pleasure to announce Adrianne Gallinari’s exhibition: desenho+pintura (drawing + painting), the artist’s first solo show in the gallery, opening on March 24th. Born in Belo Horizonte, Gallinari lives and works between Salvador, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. In desenho+pintura, the artist presents a set of twenty-eight paintings, in different formats, and a large scale drawing, made in 2018 and recently exhibited in São Paulo at Casa de Cultura do Parque.
Graduated from the renowned Escola Guignard, in Belo Horizonte, Gallinari is one of the leading figures of a generation whose appearance in the contemporary art circuit happened in the 1980s, and includes names such as Cao Guimarães, Rivane Neuenschwander, Rosangela Rennó, Alexandre da Cunha and others. The artist’s work is part of important institutional collections like the ones of Itaú Cultural (São Paulo), Coleção Madeira Corporate Service (Madeira, Portugal), Museu de Arte da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais) and the Bank of Spain (Madrid, Spain).
Throughout her trajectory, Gallinari has carried out solo shows in venues such as The Drawing Center, in New York and participated in important exhibitions like the Pontevedra Biennial, curated by Maria de Corral, besides group exhibitions such as Ordenação e Vertigem (curator: Agnaldo Farias, CCBB-SP), Desenhos A-Z (curator: Adriano Pedrosa) and the exhibition parallel to the 2008 São Paulo Biennial (curator: Rodrigo Moura).
Gallinari was also awarded the prizes “Aquisição”, at the 22nd National Art Show, at Museu de Arte da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, 1991); “Programa de Bolsas para Artistas Jovens Guillermo Kuitca” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1997); and “First Prize” at the 1st Bridgestone Biennial, Centro Cultural Borges (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2000).
Like the title of the current show (drawing + painting), the artist’s practice is focused mainly on drawing and painting, exploring the potentialities and intersections of these artistic supports. Still in her formative years, Gallinari found in drawing the gateway to the deepening of her work, through a rigorous and intensive practice in different supports, such as paper, fabric and the architectonic space itself.
It was from her extensive practice in the field of drawing that, still in the beginning of her production, Gallinari migrated to painting, moving until today between the two media with singular resourcefulness and technical precision. A work made in 2008, the large drawing present in the show is a large piece of fabric rolled out on the wall of the exhibition’s space, on which the artist sketches – in a kind of obsessive and delicate planning – small lines in crayon.
Although planned in a large scale, the panel reveals the detailed graphic intentions of the Minas-born artist, in which the readings systematically formed seem to unveil the wall’s imperfections that the work hides. The visual perception created, thus, is the one of a laborious and repetitive work, which investigates the organization of the work’s space as if the artist was sketching a mental map.
It is not a coincidence that the grooves resemble a scraped writing – of the thoughts that can’t be translated only on paper. And it is in the gaps between grooves where abstract, geometrical and visibly distinct shapes emerge, like faulty actions that present themselves with more clarity than what would be said – written or drawn - consciously. In the words of the curator Agnaldo Farias, in the text that accompanies the show,
“[In the artist’s work], the drawing is her starting point. Always. Even when surrounded by paintings of soft and light colors, misted landscapes, or lighted, awakened by the morning sun or, still, resisting the farewell of the light, when the night comes, even then, the drawing speaks louder, because in these paintings it is still the protagonist”.
In her paintings, carried out from small scales to medium and large scales, the artist explores different notions and nuances of the landscape idea. A theme largely explored throughout the history of art, landscape painting appears in Gallinari’s work with a lexicon that evokes, at the same time, the tradition of this kind of painting and a radical contemporaneity.
Her landscapes are situated in a hybrid field between figuration and abstraction, through the use of acrylic paint and brushstrokes that reveal mountains, traces of vegetation and other typical elements of the genre. The blank spaces in her canvases value her chromatic choices that compose the delicate figures and landscapes that she paints, creating a harmonic sensation between the blank spaces and areas of intense work on the canvas.
The artist creates thus a certain feeling of a visual totality, in which the entire surface of the canvas composes this hybrid compound between abstraction and figuration: a juxtaposition between distinct plans and an ample single perspective between these different elements.
Her landscapes – fruit of the experience and memory of these spaces, throughout her life – reveal the appearance of branches, trees, fields and mountains that share the visual space with delicate human figures, generating a sense of belonging between man and nature, through a game between appearance and disappearance, painting and also subtraction of the pictorial plan. Such proximity is also carried out with the use of similar geometrical drawings, allowing a potent poetic convergence of all the elements that inhabit her paintings – at the same time striking and delicately articulated.
Text by Victor Gorgulho
Adrianne Gallinari - desenho+pintura Opening: March 24th, 2022 Dates: March 25th 2022 – April 30th 2022 Roberto Alban Galeria: Rua Senta Pua, 53, Ondina, Salvador Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 7pm; Saturday, 10am to 1pm Phone: + 55 71 3241-3509 | + 55 71 3014-2549 Phone: + 55 71 99981-8305 | + 55 71 99987-2943 robertoalbangaleria@gmail.com