Manuela Viera Gallo

Walking together: for them and for us

Neckless Domestic Violence 

These castoff objects are displayed almost like an archaeological discovery, like the bones of some fossilized creature, broken and incomplete. This inventory comprises the pieces of a puzzle that can be explored like a forensic investigation, where the bodies help to recreate and imagine the original, but also reveal the fragile traditions we inherit and help to question the cyclical damage affecting our society and lives.

Manuela Viera Gallo (Italy, Chile, 1977)

Viera Gallo has made her experience as a migrant and her journeys the central theme of her work, as she intelligently combines themes such as memory and authoritarian regimes, power relations and the relationship between utopia and dystopia that operate in the geopolitical and cultural borders of modern nation-states.

Her work as an artist has been strongly shaped by the social and political violence that has affected the history of most Latin American countries.

Her practice presents a multidisciplinary body of work that departs from absurdity to manipulate and distort known symbols and imagery into an allegorical, fantastical and darkly comical framework that allows her to take ownership of subsequent transformations to analyze different processes of society.

BIO

Born during the exile of her parents in Rome, her point of view since then has been influenced by the social and political violence that affected a big part of Latin America. She creates abstract paintings and installations that often reveal beautiful and mysterious nightmares and memories of lost places. She went back to Chile in 1984 where she studied Art at The Catholic University of Santiago de Chile. She has lived in New York since 2005. 

Manuela has been credited with several distinctions and in 2010 was established as a strong young artist within the local and international circuits. She has exhibited her work internationally having solo shows at La Central Gallery, Bogota, Colombia (2013), Aninat Gallery, Santiago, Chile (2013), Y Gallery, New York. USA (2010), Valenzuela & Klenner Foundation, Bogota, Colombia (2007), Broadway 1602 Gallery, New York, USA (2007), Die Ecke Gallery, Santiago, Chile (2006; Rebecca Container Gallery, Genova, Italy (2005), 24/7 Gallery, East End London, UK (2002).  

She has participated in several group shows at Mueso del Barrio, Art Museum of the Americas, 10th Biennale of video and media Arts of Chile, CIF, Camdem International Film Festival, Asymmetrick Arts Center, Chelsea Art Museum, East Asia Contemporary Museum or 5th Biennial do Mercosur, among others.

WORKS INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBITION