This week we welcome Pauline Galiana, born in Algiers and raised in Switzerland and France. She received her MFA at ESAG Penninghen in Paris in 1984, and holds a Christie’s art business certificate. Her work has been exhibited at the New York Public Library, ChaShaMa Gallery, the gallery at the Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Brooklyn Infusion Center the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, the Columbus Museum in Georgia; Drawing Rooms art space in New Jersey; the Durham Arts Council in North Carolina, and Stadtmuseum Deggendorf in Germany, among others. In 2017 she was selected for a one-month artist residency at Mass MoCa in North Adams, Massachusetts. Her work is included in the collections of UBS, New York University, and the National Museum of Romanian Literature, where she won a 2018 Bibliophile Object-Book Biennale award.
“I engage simultaneously with many distinct bodies of work, from collages to paintings and drawings, from ephemeral installations to small-scale sculptures, from performances to videos. My work combines noble and mundane materials; whatever the specific process, materials and images are usually deconstructed, then reconstructed and hybridized,” she writes.
“I waste nothing. My processes are obsessive and meditative, combining meticulous planning and patient execution. When applied to materials of varied form, resilience, texture, the otherwise common motions of drawing, looping, sticking, or sewing become transformative. Expressing instinctive states of mind through formal compositions, often rigorous grids, I extract meaning from unexpected encounters and entropy.”
Her recent body of work scrutinizes human consumption and convenience in relation to nature, labor, and the natural cycles of time. The art pieces are entirely made of repurposed plastic, altered through time consuming techniques like slicing and hand-stitching, or sometimes simply recontextualizing. Work from this series is included in the exhibition Metamorphosis: Recycled, Repurposed, Reimagined, currently on view at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center in Solomons, Maryland.
