Artissima 2024: Annette Barcelo with works from 1985 to 1995

Back to the Future, Booth 8
Torino, Italy
November 1-3

see you next tuesday is proud to present Swiss artist Annette Barcelo in a solo exhibition within the „Back to the Future“ section of the fair. This presentation aims to contextualize Barcelo’s work from 1985 to 1995 within the broader narrative of 20th- and 21st-century art. Her distinctly feminist perspective stands out in contemporary art‘s transcultural discourse, offering key insights into the evolution of feminist thought in the 1980s and 1990s.

Annette Barcelo began her professional practice in the late 1980s, progressing from intimate works on paper exploring themes of life, birth, and death, to large-scale canvases addressing female identity through scenes of personal ritual, communal birthing, and examinations of sexuality and motherhood. Her early work featured a reserved visual language and a subdued color palette. By the 1990s, however, her style had expanded in scale and intensity: integrating drawing, mixed media, overpainting, bold colors, and expressive gestures, her work adopted a raw, more “brut” vocabulary. Her art became more vibrant, explicit, political, and assertive.

Barcelo weaves narratives that invite viewers to decipher the riddles embedded within her works. She constructs a personal bestiary populated by eerie creatures, witch priestesses, chimeras, and various animal forms. Her unique menagerie of elephants, monkeys, cats, rabbits, bats, and mythical beings conveys stories that are at once enigmatic and metaphysical. Are they dreams, states of mind? These works, hovering between life and death, evoke indigenous totemic figures with a mystical power over mortality and rebirth. Most often, the female figure remains central in her visual language, reappearing in nearly every piece.

Her art evokes the Native American figures of the Dead, the Book of the Dead, or ancient pagan iconographies. The „animal figures“ embody an emotional ambiguity, reflecting both human and animal qualities, and suggest a paradisiacal unity where death is no longer a stranger.

Annette Barcelo (*1943, Basel) lives and works in Basel. There, she also attended the Schule für Gestaltung (School of Design). Her artistic practice, spanning over five decades, often unfolds in series and across various media, including painting, drawing, and printmaking. Barcelo’s distinctive visual language explores the intersections of life’s domains—birth and death, flora and fauna, and diverse mythologies. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris, Galleria Madragoa in Lisbon, Galerie Mäder in Basel, the TANK, and the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau.

PRESS:

LE QUOTIDIEN DE L’ART 06.11.24
Johan-Frédérik Hel-Guedj