Angiola Gatti: Lines Of Time

About

In Lines of Time, Gatti continues to push the limitations of her preferred medium, the ballpoint pen. In both her intimately-scaled works on paper and large unstretched canvases, Gatti weaves a complex network of pen marks to create compositions that seem at once frenetic, spontaneous and meticulously composed. Using a limited palette of blacks, blues, reds and yellows, Gatti blurs the boundary between painting and drawing. She layers her lines to produce abstract veils of varying densities, explosions of forward motion that halt abruptly, and erratic bursts of shape and hue that seem to hover and oat.

e relationship between line and negative space is of particular signi cance to Gatti, and the exhibition’s ve large paintings range from the spare and minimal to the sprawling and dense. ese paintings emerge out of the physical relationship between her body and the canvas—the dimensions of each painting are determined by her height and reach, and her varied mark- making re ects the dynamism of her hand in motion. Combining elements of her own history and memory in addition to her corporeal experience, her works resonate with an enigmatic emotional charge. ey contain, as she has said, “an accumulation of energy, an elevation, an exuberance, a crossing, a search.”

Her long walks in the mountains of Piedmont or through her home city of Turin, where the architecture, urban landscape, and legacy of Arte Povera have helped to de ne her artistic philosophy, in uence Gatti’s incorporation of multiple vantage points. She continuously renegotiates relationships between space, line, form and void via the humble ballpoint pen. is interest in everyday surroundings and materials is also re ected in the selection of monochromatic color photographs included in the exhibition.