Gabrielle Goliath: Bearing

Across the three spaces of Via Stradella, Raffaella Cortese presents the second exhibition by Gabrielle Goliath, featuring a new body of work that explores the multiple meanings of “bearing” (to carry, to support) through a return to traditional techniques such as oil, watercolour and pastel. The artist places at the centre Black, brown, femme and queer bodies, reflecting on how these bodies sustain and give life to a world from which they remain excluded.

This series extends the artist’s ongoing multimedia practice and her engagement with questions of representation, mourning and survival. Through the materiality of painting and drawing, the works interrogate and unsettle a Eurocentric visual grammar of the nude. While at times rendered with softness and colour, the figures also challenge this tradition, appearing exposed to violence and positioned in opposition to normative ideals.

The works explore a condition in which vulnerability and resistance coexist, as bodies remain capable of holding together, maintaining balance and supporting one another. The exhibition invokes a form of Black, feminist and queer eroticism that reclaims tenderness, intimacy and desire as sites of expression and agency.