WINTER WONDERLAND
18.12.2024 - 9.01.2025
This winter, Gärna Art Gallery and Lucha de Gigantes are pleased to invite art lovers to immerse themselves in the enchanting world of Winter Wonderland, a captivating exhibition featuring a diverse compilation of works by acclaimed artists Moritz Moll, Sandra Rojo Picón, Sergio Mora, Rafael Silveira, Hugo Alonso, Carlos las Heras, Riccardo Nannini, Lantomo, Oscar Santasusagna and Juan Cuellar.
Winter Wonderland opens on December 18th and will showcase a unique narrative centered around the theme of the magic of winter — all interpreted through the distinct styles of each artist. Visitors can expect an array of paintings that collectively capture the beauty, thrill, and serenity of winter in the mountainous landscapes.
Winter is not just a season; it’s a feeling, a blend of excitement and tranquility. Each artist contributes a unique perspective that resonates with their personal experiences, allowing the audience to not only appreciate the aesthetic beauty of winter but also connect with the emotions it evokes.
From Riccardo Naninni’s dynamic representations of skiing escapades to Hugo Alonso’s serene landscapes, each piece in this exhibition reflects the wonder and challenges of winter sports, celebrating both the exhilarating rush of gliding down slopes and the peacefulness found in snow-laden environments.
ARTISTS
HUGO ALONSO
Trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Salamanca and Rome, Hugo Alonso develops exhibition projects of heterogeneous nature. His pictorial work has been expanding into other fields such as video and sound or audiovisual installation, exploring the relationship between cinematic reality and everyday life, as well as the possible analogies between the history of painting and cinema. Movies are his visual and conceptual resources. He is interested in our sense of permission with movies, in how, due to their fictional nature, they approach unimaginable subjects within the social codes that make a reality such as ours remain regulated.
Recurring motifs in the history of painting such as the landscape, the house, the salon, or the figure often plays a major role in his work, like a cinematographic plane that goes from the general to the singular. Each seemingly normal painting encloses some enigma, some unstable element, one or more visual fissures that place the image close to the conventional but on a different terrain, supposedly familiar but actually unknown. Sound and music have always been present in Alonso’s work, whether in painting, video or directly in sound productions performed under his first name or the alias Lynda Blair.
RICARDO NANNINI
Riccardo Nannini (Italy, 1980) is graduated in Industrial Design from the Politecnico di Milano. After a few years as designer Andrea Incontri’s assistant, in 2010 he moves to Barcelona, radically changing his career and his way of life. He begins to experiment with drawing and painting. The reflections that go along with these works motivate his first artistic steps. The absurdity of human nature and the pressure of social interactions on the definition of identity are still among the central themes of his works.
Nannini immerses himself in the city’s underground scene and collaborates with various magazines, galleries and emerging brands. In 2014 he presents his first individual exhibition, a story on 14 black and white canvases with a strong charge of provocation. Since then, his pictorial investigation gradually narrows its focus on the conciliation of tradition and contemporaneity, mingling references which range from Renaissance to comics. After nearly ten years of study and practice, Nannini develops a personal language that moves freely between classical painting, folklore, and pop culture, a style that has led him to exhibit in numerous solo and group shows in the US, Europe, and Asia. He currently lives and works between Barcelona and Southern Tuscany.
SANDRA ROJO PICÓN
Sandra Rojo Picón (Madrid, 1985) grew up in a family of lawyers, but the genetic influence of her father's family, who were always dedicated to the world of cinema, echoed in her personality, pushing her towards creation from a very young age and although she also sculpted ceramics and wrote stories, she soon turned to oil painting. In 2004 she moved to London to study fashion design, first a Foundation course in Art and Design, then a BA Womenswear, graduating with First Class Honours and finally an MA Womenswear. All at London College of Fashion. During her stay in London she did internships at Luella Bartley and Jasmine di Milo.
In 2012 she returned to Madrid and after a brief stint at Loewe she started working at Joyería Suarez designing collections and pieces of a more conceptual nature until 2022. However, in 2023, after participating in four group exhibitions in the Lucha de Gigantes project and in four others in galleries in Madrid and Barcelona, he returned to painting, inaugurating his first solo exhibition ‘A cualquier otra parte en Utopia Parkway’.
RAFAEL SILVEIRA
Rafael Silveira is a visual artist based in Curitiba, Brazil. He began his artistic career in the 1990s as a graphic artist. His works filled the pages of several fanzines and independent magazines before being featured by the American publisher Dark Horse and several Brazilian magazines. His graphic work was internationally awarded and become a foundation for his pictorial vision.
In 2007, he starts to painting with oils. Cities such as São Paulo, New York, London and Milan have hosted exhibitions of the artist and his works appear worldwide in important private and institutional collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RIO) and Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON - PR).
In 2022 the artist present his first immersive solo show at São Paulo's Farol Santander, attracting more than 140 thousand visitors, a new record public for the artist's shows. His work was also exhibited in the Spanish Museum Afundacion, in the cities of Santiago de Compostela and Coruña, with the group show Imaxinária, being the main piece in the show's oficial promotional campaign.
SERGIO MORA
Sergio Mora, also known as MAGICOMORA, is an artist whose work defies convention and transcends the boundaries between high and low culture. Born in Barcelona in 1975, Mora has created a distinctive visual universe, full of references to surrealism, pop art and popular culture, but always imbued with a unique magic that is entirely his own. From the beginning, Mora showed a penchant for the fantastic and the dreamlike. His early works reveal a fascination with myths and legends, elements that have endured and evolved in his work over the years. Mora's training at the Escola LLotja in Barcelona gave him a solid grounding in the visual arts, but it was his personal vision and unmistakable style that really set him apart in the contemporary art scene.
Mora is a master of visual storytelling. Each of his works tells a story, often populated by eccentric characters and surreal situations. His ability to combine traditional techniques with a contemporary approach has captured the attention of collectors and critics alike. His murals and paintings often present a mixture of humour, eroticism and playful innocence that invites the viewer to immerse themselves in his world.
LANTOMO
Lantomo, pseudonym of Antonella Montes, is an Italian artist based in Barcelona. The passion for drawing, inherited from her mother, has been a constant in her life. She studied architecture in Italy; then moves to Spain, specializing in scenography and exhibition design. Since 2010, Lantomo started to dedicate herself exclusively to painting, and her passion has definitely become a job. And in this journey, her stay of almost two years in Beijing, China, have left an indelible trace. Her drawings have become more accurate and detailed, her only colors the black and white, with touches of red, and the drawn faces have come to have Asian features.
"The content of my works is a reflection on the women´s role in society and their iconic representation in the art history and in the present. I move on a boundary between painting and graphic design, with images suggested from the fashion and advertising world to the most classic art history".
MORITZ MOLL
Moritz, born in Munich in 1991, is a young artist known for his figurative aesthetics and use of personal photographs, archive images, and screenshots as reference material. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 2021 and has been exhibiting for over six years with increasing success. Moritz's unique combination of two- and three-dimensionality contemporizes the portrait genre, challenging the viewer's perception of still life versus traditional portraiture. His ability to elevate everyday activities with a soft pastel colour palette sets his work apart from other portraitists.
The unfinished aesthetic, reminiscent of family snapshots, evokes a sense of longing and nostalgia. Through his paintings, Moritz captures fleeting moments and freezes them in time, inviting the viewer to observe these intimate scenes with subtle detachment. From athletes engaged in routine activities to dream-like moments, he creates a seamless process that transforms everyday occurrences into captivating spectacles. His work promises to offer a fresh perspective on portrait painting, characterized by its sweet, genuine, and sketchy style.
ÓSCAR SANTASUSAGNA
He believes that creation is a way to understand and reinterpret the world. The purpose of art is to raise questions, stir consciences, and evoke emotions in the viewer. Each work should be a means of communication rather than just an exercise in aesthetics or technique.
The artist's style is heavily influenced by narrative and symbolism. He began his artistic journey by combining his work in a university office with a passion for literature, eventually deciding to express their words through drawing. His projects are a blend of image and literature. In terms of technique, the artist prefers acrylic paint for its flexibility, power, and immediacy. Despite the technical aspects, Santasusagna claims that the creator is simply an interpreter of ideas or characters. "The painter's gaze must be permeable to what surrounds him. I am fascinated by the capacity for synthesis of Banksy's or Morley's street painting, the neo-expressionism of the 80s or certain abstract art, but I don't like the way it can be applied to the world around me".
CARLOS ÁLVAREZ LAS HERAS
Carlos Álvarez Las Heras (Spain, 1982) is a figurative painter who stands out for his particular use of the distortion of time, colour and space.
His work is influenced by the world of comics, where the artist places the individual in interaction with others, mixed with backgrounds of powerful colours, as the central axis of his works.
In 2005 he was invited to exhibit at the Colegio de España in Paris, where he received the award La Medalla al Mérito Artístico en Artes Plásticas.
JUAN CUELLAR
Juan Cuéllar is a painter who graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Valencia. Since 1995, he has had an impressive exhibition career, receiving scholarships from various institutions such as the Valencian Provincial Council and the Spanish Academy in Rome. His work can be found in museums and collections including the Artium Museum, IVAM, and the Spanish Academy in Rome. Cuéllar's artwork focuses on popular imagery and mass media, with a particular interest in the 1950s as a transition period in modernity. He often uses the image of Mickey Mouse's head as a symbol of the universal, democratic, industrialized, and imperial citizen. Additionally, his work includes faceless, anonymous figures filled with colour, exploring themes related to paradoxical, enigmatic, and metaphysical aspects of social reality. In 2007, he co-founded Encapsulados, a project for curating portable art exhibitions, and has exhibited his work in various cities around the world.