LUGANO.- MASI Lugano presents Many Moons, Switzerland’s first major museum exhibition dedicated to Louisa Gagliardi. For the occasion, the artist has created two monumental new series of paintings and a number of sculptures, exhibited in a site-specific presentation curated for LAC’s lower ground floor. The project also includes a selection of paintings from recent years.
Louisa Gagliardi (1989, Sion, Switzerland, lives and works in Zurich) is one of the most interesting figures on the Swiss contemporary art scene. Her works, whose subject matter taps into artistic movements such as surrealism, metaphysics and magical realism, forge an unsettling yet intriguing imaginary realm that draws on a wide range of aesthetic registers, from the history of art to popular culture. The imaginary worlds dreamt up by Gagliardi reflect on the complexities of modern life and, like inner snapshots of our hyper-connected era, they investigate the meaning of identity, the ongoing social transformations and the relationship between the individual and their environment.
Gagliardi’s paintings feature unsettling details and shifts in perception that turn seemingly everyday scenes into dreamlike visions; through a skilful use of trompe-l’oeil and painstaking attention to detail, her works force the viewer to look, to go, beyond the painted surface. This layering of meanings and contents is reflected in the innovative approach the artist applies to stretch the limits and possibilities of a traditional genre such as painting. Her works are indeed the outcome of a lengthy, complex procedure: the images are first digitally processed then printed on vinyl and stretched onto frames, before being finished with varnish, gel or glitter.
Louisa Gagliardi’s show at MASI unfolds through a path that initially seems to follow the conventions of a classic presentation of paintings, but once you cross the threshold, it reveals unexpected twists.
The large frameless paintings that inhabit the space, like openings or windows onto other dimensions, create a subtle sensation of unease. Nature invades urban scenarios with a retrofuturistic flavour in the form of vaguely jarring, seemingly random details such as the peaches scattered on the ground in Climbing (2024), or the blue tits that appear around a couple seen from behind in Birds of a Feather (2023). Other paintings engage more boldly with the absurd; while in some nature dominates the human element, subverting the anthropized perspective, as in the dystopian vision of the car in Swamped (2024), literally submerged in water and surrounded by herons.
