NYAB Event - Angiola Gatti “Una Direzione in un Andare”

Angiola Gatti “Una Direzione in un Andare”

RYAN LEE

This event has ended.

RYAN LEE presents “Una Direzione in un Andare,” the debut solo exhibition of Angiola Gatti in the United States. The show features five large works on canvas and a series of smaller works on paper. Gatti began this series of abstractions in the early 1990s, all of which are executed in ballpoint pen, sometimes incorporating oil stick and acrylic paint.

Starting in one section of the canvas, Gatti spatially conceives systems relating to architecture, rhythm and proportions. During extensive walks throughout Turin, she immerses herself in the city’s impressive views, which both inform and reflect the multiple vantage points evident throughout her compositions. She is interested in the physical and mental dimensions of space encountered during these walks. In her more minimal works, Gatti is acutely aware of negative space versus created space, producing meditative voids and unexpected configurations. Her mark-making ranges from tightly controlled to large and gestural as an intuitive investigation of drawing, line, and form. The changing density and color juxtapositions function to enhance elements of pictorial depth, generating an overall atmospheric, yet structured quality. Interested in philosophy and most recently in phenomenology, Gatti engages her own history and memory by extracting the essential features of personal experiences and translating them into her work. Gatti chooses her canvases in a large, 1:1 format, referencing the physicality of the body and highlighting the artist’s process, while the drawings have a movement and immediacy dictated by scale.

Born and raised in Turin, Italy, the birthplace of Arte Povera, Gatti’s use of a common tool— the everyday ballpoint pen— functions as a literal interpretation of this tradition. Gatti pushes the boundary between painting and drawing, suggesting the irrelevance of such distinctions in a contemporary context. Both means of mark-making have become increasingly intermingled in recent years and Gatti’s work challenges these hierarchical notions of medium. Her process, hermetic in practice, is revealed through the contemplative aspects of her work.

Gatti has exhibited at Villa Giulia at Centro di Ricerca Arte Attuale (CRAA), Verbania, Italy; Le Creux de l’enfer, Centre d’art contemporain, Thiers, France; Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, UK. Her work is in the permanent collection of Fonds regional d’art contemporain (FRAC) Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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