LINDA CARRARA
La prima passeggiata
Linda Carrara dedicates her work to still life and to a related technical and material research. The object thus becomes a pretext, and painting itself becomes the subject of a figurative logic.
The works presented in the solo exhibition La prima passeggiata (The First Walk) – held at CONTEMPORALIS with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute – recount the story of a walk in nature, an initiatory journey that can be understood as a true voyage into an uncontaminated landscape. It becomes a reflection on the concept of Mother Nature, on its matter and its force—qualities that seem to pour their essence into Linda Carrara’s painting.
Wild brushstrokes and overlapping reflections of light and bodies of water illuminate and dazzle the viewer, blurring their vision. The details captured by the artist’s eye are carried from her mind to her studio and finally onto her canvases, which become the support for a narrative about the passing seasons, the alternation of day and night, and that often overlooked matter of which both Nature and humankind are composed.
Carrara investigates reality through “rubbings”, understood not as a forced representation of natural data but rather as a restitution of form that removes any precise reference to proportion. The result is a total immersion in either a macro or micro portion of space containing the force of the universal and the secret of the earth.
Linda Carrara, born in Bergamo in 1984, lives and works between Milan and Brussels. She graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2006 and later completed a Master’s degree at the KASK School of Arts in Ghent in 2014–2015, during which she collaborated with Michaël Borremans as a studio assistant.
Her solo exhibitions include: Centrul de Interes, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2022); Riss(e), Varese (2022); Contemporalis, Paris (2022); The Open Box, Milan (2021); RizzutoGallery, Palermo (2020); Boccanera Gallery, Trento (2019); Galleria Iragui, Moscow (2019); Italian Cultural Institute, Brussels (2018); Musumeci Contemporary, Brussels (2017).
Her work has also been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including: Fondazione ICA, Milan (2022); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2022); AIS Gallery and Rinko-KAKU [Tea Room], Japan (2019); Museum Floris Romer, Győr (2019); Casa Testori, Novate Milanese (2019 and 2018); Villa d’Este, Tivoli (2018); Artopia–Rita Urso Gallery, Milan (2018); Villa Vertua, Nova Milanese (2018); Boccanera Gallery, Trento (2023 and 2016).
Her works consist of different pictorial layers in time, light, matter and visual logic which, once stratified and superimposed, generate worlds that appear coherent and unified. At first glance, her paintings seem to evoke – almost mimicking – the surrounding reality; however, only by approaching them and entering into relation with the painted surface do hints and details of the real gradually lose their clarity, transforming into an abstraction of gestures, traces and painterly experiences.
Suspended between reality and fiction, Carrara questions the pictorial medium by presenting it as the subject of a figurative logic that asks matter itself to transform into something else, opening it to the imaginary and to chance.