NEW YORK, NY.- Nara Roesler announced the representation of artist Rodrigo Andrade (São Paulo, 1962), who will present his first exhibition at the gallery's Rio headquarters in November 2024. Andrade began his career at the end of the 1970s, a time in which he trained at Sérgio Fingermann's studio for printmaking. From 1982, alongside Fabio Miguez, Paulo Monteiro, Nuno Ramos, and Carlito Carvalhosa, he joined the collective studio Casa 7. During this period, his work, like that of many painters of this generation, was marked by a neo-expressionist influence. The group took part in the 18th São Paulo Biennial, which became notorious for highlighting the revival of painting.

In the following decades, his work moved between radical abstractions and different strands of figuration. While in the early 1990s his research brought to painting the dark universe of the engraver Oswaldo Goeldi, from the late 1990s onwards, the artist began directing his work towards abstraction, converting his pictorial elements into rectangular blocks with a constructive aspect. From 2000 onwards, he began experimenting with expanded painting, dialoguing with architectural spaces through works that had aspects of installation.

From 2009 onwards he returned to the figurative element in his work by using photographic images as the basis for paintings in the Matéria Noturna series, which he presented at the 29th São Paulo Biennial, where darkness is materialized in paint. Since then, landscape painting has featured prominently in his poetics, whether through his notorious night scenes or through works in which color is once again the protagonist, whether based on photographs or versions of old paintings, but always exploring the materiality of paint and the dry cuts of the stencil. While maintaining and deepening his roots in landscape painting, in recent years his work has diversified into series such as Praça da República, Bi-laterais, Pinturas de subtração and Criaturas ornamentais, which today come together synthetically.

In the words of curator Taisa Palhares: "In the 1990s, Rodrigo Andrade moved towards the construction of a personal poetic, in which he consolidated the centrality of painting in his artistic work (...) using large masses of oil paint, the colors began to stand out as raw material, at the same time as they pointed out the artist's tendency to work on the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, which would mark his later career."

In recent years, Andrade has held some important solo exhibitions, among them: Rodrigo Andrade: Painting Landscape (Millan e Almeida e Dale, São Paulo, Brazil, 2022); Rodrigo Andrade: Painting and Matter (Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, 2017); Old stone bridge and other paintings (Millan, 2011); Oil on (Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, 2010); Matéria Noturna at the 29th São Paulo International Biennial (2010) and Lanches Alvorada (Bar Lanches Alvorada, 2001).