Gabriella Sanchez: Partial Pictures
Curated by MOLAA Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga
August 22, 2021 - January 2022
Gabriella Sanchez: Partial Pictures
Curated by MOLAA Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga
Partial Pictures is the first solo museum exhibition of artist Gabriella Sanchez. Her creative world is the result of layers of questions that emerge from her city of Los Angeles and her family’s archive, loaded with an aesthetic and subjective substance to be discovered.
Through the connection of the power of words, linking with photographs as a fragment of reality and an imaginary of identity and memory, the artist chooses and develops an intimate inflection that depicts the categories that occur around culture and urban experiences. Sanchez explores forms of communication, mixing her concerns about social and political psychology with the binary definitions surrounding gender, race, and migration, where the statement is a central element of her work that we can find in each piece that she creates with humor and critical vision.
From a video performance Baile Final and her inspiration from Edgar Degas in First and Second, to a powered flag recollecting memories and voices about civil rights, sculptures with hopeful messages surrounded by chains, and her younger sister and friends immersed in their dreams but looking directly at the camera, the artist decodes the complex vocabulary of our times, reconfiguring the new meanings of signs, roots, and gestures with a radical sensibility.
About the artist
Portrait of Gabriella Sanchez.
Courtesy of the artist.
(c) 2021 Gabriella Sanchez
Gabriella Sanchez (b.1988) ) is a self-directed learner, a fan of sci-fi, and a multidisciplinary artist. As a painter she employs a range of artistic expression from abstraction to portraiture, with a particular focus on both form and language within the perspectives of art, design, and psychology. This is done to reexamine, re-image, and reimagine themes from her own life and the life of her loved ones which address issues of class in relation to: labor, race, addiction, gender, education, imprisonment and system-induced death. She does this through a lens which incorporates public archives alongside personal imagery and narrative. Her art practice focuses on art-making as a tool for survival and a tool for coping with survival.
She began exhibiting her paintings and works on paper in 2016, and since then her work has been exhibited at spaces such as LACMA, Jeffrey Deitch (New York and Los Angeles), Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), Páramo Galeria (Guadalajara), the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), Stems Gallery (Brussels), LMAK Gallery (New York), and the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, CA. Sanchez has exhibited in international art fairs including Frieze Los Angeles, Zona Maco in CDMX, EXPO Chicago, and the Armory Show in New York, NY. Her work is in notable collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the JP Morgan & Chase Collection, and numerous esteemed private collections. Gabriella Sanchez lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.
Sponsorship acknowledgement
This exhibition and opening celebration were made possible in part thanks to a generous gift from Chelsea and Ali Rana and from Theodore and Heather Karatz.