Carles Gabarró at #LaCriptaProjects
While Ofelia García's exhibition for PhotoEspaña 2023 is taking place on the main floor of the gallery, downstairs in LA CRIPTA we find a single project by the Catalan artist Carles Gabarró. A series of canvases and drawings in small formats accompany a large canvas making up Gabarró's first exhibition at the Galería Rafael Pérez Hernando. Influenced by the Spanish earthy landscape and the spirit of Goya, his painting tends towards the tragic and grotesque, with objectual repetition playing an important role in his works.
"I have always had a special predilection for painting, and despite knowing Carles Gabarró for several years and knowing of his activity as a painter, I had never visited his studio. In October 2022 I finally visited him and I discovered in his work that of a great painter in the time-honoured way. After preparing a careful selection of works from different times, with special attention to the “vanitas”, a few months later we are opening this exhibition with which we hope that the public will rediscover this painter".
Rafael Pérez Hernando
The pictorial imagery of Carles Gabarró (Barcelona, 1956) was shaped in the nineteen-eighties. It was in Paris that he first heard the siren call of painting and embarked on a free, self-taught artistic path within an exciting context marked by the emergence of German neoexpressionism, the Italian transavantgarde and the triumph of new Spanish painting. Gabarró sought to articulate a shadowy, metaphorical painting that responded to his most intimate obsessions – the human condition, solitude, death – and to create painterly motifs – skulls, books, beds, shipwrecks – that connect his work to contemporary and universal painting. The result is a body of work that is expressive, but also meditative and structured, in a style that he has consistently refined, despite changing trends in the art world, now from his studio in L’Hospitalet.
CARLES GABARRÓ - Hypothesis of Existence by Albert Mercadé.
TECLA SALA Centre d'Art, Hospitalet del Llobregat, 2022
