Gabrielle Barzaghi at Gloucester's Matthew Swift Gallery
Horse Opera Presents Large Pastel Drawings
By: Matthew Swift - Jun 17, 2023
Matthew Swift Gallery, in Gloucester, announces the first solo exhibition of 2023.
Gabrielle Barzaghi's Horse Opera will open with a reception for the artist on Saturday, June 24, 5–7pm, and will be on view through Monday, July 31.
Horse Opera is Barzaghi's fourth solo exhibition at the Gallery, and presents a significant new body of her work comprising more than a dozen drawings.
The title piece Horse Opera and four other drawings are major new works having dimensions about 50 x 70 inches.
Barzaghi’s drawings begin with a story, object, scene, or work of art which captures her imagination. While they remain fundamentally an essay in the practice of drawing led by the hand and eye, her drawings become a remarkable record of a chapter of creative discovery, taking shape from the ideas, narratives, and passions of the mind and heart — the serendipitous influences, as the drawing develops, of personal experiences, sociopolitical realities, and the histories of literature and visual art.
Beginning with intention and developed with intuition, Barzaghi’s creative process embraces difficulties, risks failure, runs headlong into self-doubt, and weathers the capriciousness of creative inspiration. The drawings which make it to gallery walls are inspired, surprising, unequivocally original works of art, which hold three elements in a rare balance: a political edge, mythic transcendence, and an insistence on their own materiality. They shelter mystery within harmony and reveal the entanglement of beauty and understanding.
Barzaghi employs a wide variety of media and drawing techniques, but pastels on paper are principal. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Cape Ann Museum and the deCordova Museum, and has been shown throughout New England.
She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and after living and working in Boston’s artists’ lofts, she moved to Gloucester in the mid-1990s. She taught drawing at the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University for over thirty years and now works full time in her studio, and is represented by the Matthew Swift Gallery.
Matthew Swift Gallery
189 Main Street
Gloucester, Mass
01930
978 491-7785