ZURICH.- Galerie Eva Presenhuber announced the representation of the Zurich-based artist Louisa Gagliardi.

Paintings by Gagliardi are currently on view at Eva Presenhuber, New York, alongside works by Yves Scherer, until March 5. Gagliardi will also feature in a group show at the Maag Areal gallery in Zurich from February 12 to April 9.

I have been observing Louisa Gagliardi’s work for some years and am thrilled to announce that she has joined the gallery. An exceptional artist, Louisa uses her distinct form of portraiture and surprising techniques to pull you into the glow of her paintings, only to subvert your expectations and confront you like a mirror. I look forward to seeing how Louisa’s practice evolves as she works on her first solo show with us next year and beyond. — Eva Presenhuber

Gagliardi's 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 handworked 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.

Louisa Gagliardi was born in 1989 in Sion, CH, and lives and works in Zurich, CH. She has had solo exhibitions at Antenna Space, Shanghai, CN; Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw, PL; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, BE; McNamara Art Projects, Hong Kong, HK; MOSTYN, Llandudno, UK; Plymouth Rock, Zurich, CH; and Pilar Corrias, London, UK. She has participated in group exhibitions at the National Gallery Prague, Prague, CZ; Centre d’art contemporain Genève, Geneva, CH; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, CH; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, CH; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, CH; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, DK; and Istituto Svizzero, Rome, IT.