Exhibitions
Carla Grunauer exhibits her entire organic and mythical repertoire in Piedras
The Piedras Gallery in Buenos Aires opens a new exhibition cycle with the show The Sentimental Shore by Carla Grunauer (Tucumán, 1982), where she explores painting, drawing and sculpture, exploring figurations that stem from free associations and evoke primitive and metaphysical imaginaries.
Carla Grunauer is a prominent Argentine visual artist, born in 1982 in Tucumán, and based in Buenos Aires since 2015. One of her most relevant exhibitions was her first solo museum show, titled "Las oferentes" at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (October 2021–April 2022), curated by Lucrecia Palacios. In it, she combined paintings and sculptures in plaster or fiber on canvas, depicting hybrid figures—half animal, half human—in constant transformation, with phosphorescent colors and unexpected objects such as nests or shoe heels.
Messages for Structure, Carla Grunauer, 2023.
This new exhibition at Piedras is the artist's third at the gallery, where the shore manifests itself as an unstable threshold, a permeable border that is constantly being constructed and diluted. This idea of fluidity and transformation permeates the entire work: in the paintings, the absence of black lines redefines boundaries, and contours emerge through subtraction, causing figure and ground to emerge from a single substance.
Carla Grunauer: The Past, Carla Grunauer, 2022.
The figures that populate these works—ambiguous creatures, halfway between the organic and the artificial—seem to engage in minimal, almost ritualistic gestures: acts of exploration, of care, of pause. They are suspended in an intermediate zone, where the human and the mechanical intertwine without being fully resolved, as if inhabiting an ontological threshold. In this universe, Grunauer constructs a visual poetics deeply connected to the affective dimension of portraiture. It is not simply a matter of depicting faces or bodies, but of activating in them a field of sensitivity from which to rethink what we understand by consciousness: not as a closed, individual entity, but as a porous network, in constant dialogue with its surroundings.
Grunauer has been building an aesthetic universe that blends the organic with the mythical, passing through the absurd, always articulated through the body and its transformations. The artist uses visual language with great narrative force and chromatic vibrancy, often challenging the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.
Okki, from the Orgo series, Carla Grunauer, 2020.
