Louisa Gagliardi

This first monograph on Swiss artist Louisa Gagliardi introduces her specific voice within the landscape of contemporary painting.

Louisa Gagliardi (born 1989 in Sion, Switzerland) draws freely from the codes of painting as well as contemporary graphic design and advertising in order to rethink questions of figure and ground, flatness and depth, dimensionality and translucence, the enigmatic and the banal, the digital imagery and the painterly marks. Her paintings exist as reflections: internally, of artist and viewer, and of the rapid acceleration of technology in our visualized and socialized worlds. Their liminal status, as both digitally rendered images and physically confronting objects, speaks as much to contemporary concerns of self-mediated personas as they do to the compositions and narratives of the classics of art history. At its heart, Gagliardi’s oeuvre plays with expectations, fulfilling and subverting them simultaneously. When one views the work, ideas of authenticity and authorship are begged for and rebuffed; the smooth digital surfaces of the paintings blossom into echoes and refractions of their hand-worked surfaces as they are approached and circled. Brushstrokes exist physically and printed, as clear gel medium creates texture and melodrama, forcing the signature marks of the artist executed with mouse on screen to confront total issues of reality within painting.