miart

April 1 - 3, 2022

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Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present a solo presentation of new works by Alexa Guariglia at miart 2022. This presentation marks the first for both the artist and the gallery in Europe.

In her new paintings, Alexa Guariglia continues in the direction of works included in Curl Memory, her most recent exhibition at the gallery, which was on view in the fall of 2021. Making extensive use of sketching, planning, and layering in gouache and watercolor, the artist has continued her move away from the brushy, gestural mark-making that defined her earlier bodies of work. Still, spontaneity remains in the nooks and wallpapered grounds of her compositions, where surreal and absurd vignettes suggest states of dreaming and impressionistic remembering.

Dense scenes of fantastic normalcy–birdwatching, dreaming, sculpting, typing, eating, brushing teeth–come alive through richly pigmented and meticulously executed patterns. All but the figures’ bodies are mossed over in geometric and organic repetitions that develop and evolve as they sprawl across the picture. Close looking is rewarded in moments of embedded humor, such as a set of dice replacing ice cubes in a glass of green liquid in Intermission, or a series of avian waltzes, in The Night Watch.

Guariglia’s cerebral and considered compositions unfurl slowly, as humor steadily gives way to latticed studies of psychological and architectural space, and the physical properties of painting on paper. Rife with symbolism and suggestion, Guariglia’s latest pictures become sites of introspection, while perspectival cues obliquely reveal each painting’s narrative underpinnings. Themes of pleasure, femininity, memory, and studio practice become structural guides, with the artist exploring the outer limits of technique and subject, alike.

As part of a generation of female painters dealing with those intersections of history, the self, and the act of painting in the 21st century, Guariglia remains concerned with both the personal and the universal. Breadth gives way to specificity as the unidentified and abstracted subject becomes irreducible by way of a practice marked by a constant interplay between discursive poles. Couching deeply synthesized geometric abstraction within figurative painting, Guariglia travels within and outside the current moment, as her paintings invite readings distinctly outside their immediate subject matter.