Issue # 41 Manuela Viera Gallo

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For more than two decades Manuela Viera-Gallo has been observing her environment (social, cultural, domestic, affective) and turning her singular vision into an eminently experimental production: objects, installations and videos that make up a visual narrative charged with an existential and feminist gaze.

Her work has brought together universal collective issues, typical of the human condition, together with an intimate and contemporary perspective.

Part of a family traditionally linked to Chilean politics and who had to go into exile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Manuela Viera-Gallo was born in 1977 in Rome. Her early childhood was spent immersed in uprooting; in Chile she spent her youth and her subsequent training as an artist at the Catholic University of Santiago. In 2005 she moved to New York, where her experience as a Latin American immigrant and, later, as a mother in a foreign land, has been key in forging an eloquent and vital body of work.

During the last five years, the artist has concentrated her artistic practice almost exclusively on painting: oil paintings on canvas in traditional formats that generally address the also conventional genres of portraiture and landscape.

In his paintings, Viera-Gallo takes charge of the vicissitudes of contemporary life, condensed in an expressive proposal that manifests itself as a multitude of voices articulated simultaneously: the voice that has been silenced, the one that has been distorted, the one that rebels and protests and exceeds, the one that sinks and the one that emerges, the one that entangles itself in familiar constellations, the one that merges sensually with the world, the one that hides behind shields and masks, disguises and smokescreens.

In times when the planet is going through a period of accelerated social and spiritual transformations, Manuela Viera-Gallo's current paintings raise conjunctural questions and contribute to offer an imaginative and sensitive perspective to the complex panorama of the present.

Cristian Silva