Louisa Gagliardi

This first monograph on Louisa Gagliardi (b. 1989) introduces her specific voice within the landscape of contemporary painting. She draws freely from the codes of painting as well as on contemporary graphic design and advertising in order to rethink questions of figure and ground, flatness and depth, dimensionality and translucence, the enigmatic and the banal, digital imagery and painterly marks. Her paintings exist as reflections: internally, of artist and viewer, and of the rapid acceleration of technology in our visualized and socialized worlds. Their liminal status, as both digitally rendered images and physically present objects, speaks as much to contemporary concerns of self-mediated personas as they do to the compositions and narratives of the classics of art history. At its heart, Gagliardi’s oeuvre plays with expectations, fulfilling and subverting them simultaneously.