NINA PANDOLFO 'Little Things for Life',
Coburn Projects, NY
Rivington Street Gallery - 2 Rivington Street, New York City
6 November – 29 November 2015
Wed – Sun 10 - 6pm
“Little Things for Life” is Nina Pandolfo’s debut solo exhibition in New York showing at Coburn Project’s Lower East Side gallery.
One of Brazil’s most significant female graffiti artists, born in 1977 in the city of Tupa, São Paulo, Nina Pandolfo was recognized for her talents at a very early age. In the 1990’s, Nina was part of the Brazilian artist generation working with notable artists including Os Gemeos and Nunca, who evolved graffiti and brought street art to major museums and galleries on a global scale. Pandolfo’s highly technical and detailed work naturally leads its way to canvas and she now exhibits her paintings in recognized galleries around the world including Galeria Leme in São Paulo, Lazarides Gallery in London as well as galleries in the USA, Germany, Cuba, Spain, France and Greece.
Pandolfo’s new mural will be painted on the Rivington Wall located opposite the Rivington Street gallery and will be visible until the end of the year. Since 2014, Rivington Wall, located between Bowery and Chrystie Streets, is a project that invites selected artists like RETNA, Olaf Breuning, Andrew Poneros, and Pryce Lee to intervene, regularly creating new murals.
The painting exhibition will include Pandolfo’s most recent work, canvases dipped in a fantasy world, estranged of time and place and painted within a dreamlike state of wonder. While looking at her paintings, one gets hypnotized by the glassy questioning eyes of the characters staring out of the canvases and searching in a most fascinating and hopeful way to their surrounding. The artist gives us a feeling as if we are invited to view the world along side her and if for just a moment relive a childhood memory.
This new body of work is inspired by the lightness and beauty of simplicity with a refined perception of small details one experiences in every day life. “It is about the little details, little things that sometimes pass unnoticed in our life, although it is often in these small details where we find and recognize the joy, peace or even a moment of purity” the artist states. Pandolfo looks for counterpoints to the bustle and stress of modern life, the on-going information flow of a continuous online connection. Speaking with the artist she reminds us that “We often forget how beautiful it is to lie in the grass, looking up into the moving shapes of a treetop. During childhood these things make us wonder and transform the day in a special way but later on we often disregard or leave them aside.”
For this exhibition, Pandolfo continues her on-going curiosity for new materials and techniques, using a light absorbing ink that glows in the dark and that creates a surprising, wondering and delightful effect of perception.
