El metal que sueña
solo show by Carla Grunauer
Gilda Lavia Gallery (Rome) is pleased to present El metal que sueña the second solo show by Argentine artist Carla Grunauer, which will open on Thursday, December 4th at 5:30 pm.
The exhibition features a significant selection of recent works, specifically site-specific for the gallery spaces, offering a mature and cohesive overview of the artist's current practice.
Carla Grunauer’s body of work is configured as a meticulous investigation into figurations that unfold along a path of free associations and mental landscapes, a visual ecosystem where architectural forms, abstractions, and icons coexist in constant negotiation.
As Benedetta Casini writes in the accompanying critical essay:
“Carla Grunauer’s is a hybrid world, inhabited by sculptural figures and pictorial representations that share a fundamental ambiguity. These are anthropomorphic anatomies that crawl and creep, shedding their human form to stretch into a horizontality that is at times amphibious, at times raptorial. There is an unsettling aspect to the way these strange creatures fold in on themselves, in the disproportionate length of their legs relative to the rest of the body, and in their necks stretched to such an extent that, if dependent on the support of a human spine, they would soon fracture.
It may be precisely the underlying linearity, a constant element in both the canvases and the sculptures, that intervenes to hold these deformed figures together. A line that is at moments vortical, almost Baroque, and at others more rigorous, transparently traversing these otherwise hollow bodies, filling their cavities. This declares the artist's paradoxical fascination with the skeleton, the internal structure of things.
In the case of the sculptures, this structure is a wire armature, a metal that, according to the exhibition title, suddenly comes to life and, as the unexpected agent of a fantastical digression, begins to dream. The skeletal framework that makes these hybrid creatures possible, in effect, deeply penetrates them like a submerged unconscious that reverberates on the surface in surreal forms, at times playful, not far from materialized dream visions.”