Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2020
1989
Poland
Dawid Radziszewski
"Gagliardi's paintings don’t look like anything else out there. Moody, uncanny, oddly lit, and uncomfortably sensual, they brim with an implacable sense of unease"*
"The glazed surface adds an oddly aerosol-like texture to the already obscure and unattainable objects and persons in her paintings. The final images often seem “unreal,” inducing dizziness and vertigo"*
"These are paintings populated by bodies seemingly cut from a single mould: each one is a gummy humanoid rendered as a rudimentary sexless silhouette, all soft edges"*
Gagliardi creates her paintings directly in Photoshop, often based on hand-sketches. She prints ready images on the banner-like PVC material which is then stretched like a canvas. Last but not least she applies a thin layer of translucent gel medium or nail polish on some parts of the surface of each painting.
To see the whole process watch a video interview with the artist.
"Something decidedly creepy is going on in this work. It displays the artist’s virtuoso ability to create discomfort and brings us to the edge of the uncanny. Gagliardi’s are afterimages, things that you have seen in the past and that come back to you in dreams or amid the noise of media overstimulation"
(from the review of Gagliardi's recent show with Dawid Radziszewski Gallery by Agata Pyzik for Artforum, 2020)
Louisa Gagliardi – born in 1989 in Switzerland, lives and works in Zurich. Gagliardi has a background in graphic design – studied in Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne ECAL (BA, 2012) and Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In her works, which are a mix of Photoshop and IRL painting, she deals with the notion of voyeurism, projecting oneself into another reality, testing the boundaries of access and restriction.