Barbur Gallery is pleased to invite you to Gustavo Sagorsky's solo exhibition Happy to Fall, which features a series of large-scale paintings on paper made over the past two years. While his practice is deeply rooted in photography, Sagorsky’s varied body of work encompasses sculpture and artist books.

The exhibition at Barbur Gallery showcases Sagorsky's painting: large-scale works in long format and bold colors, that employ a mixed technique of pencil, ink, acrylic and oil. The paintings depict fragmentary moments, imaginative scenes containing figures in different conditions; fallen, overturned, bent, prostrate.

Segursky constructs his paintings with the logic of a doodle that slowly takes command of an entire surface. Prominent drawn elements disrupt this mode of scene-creation: they introduce a sense of chaos and commotion while simultaneously demarcating figurative elements and color-surfaces; they generate visual articulations which both construct and dismantle the balance of background and figures.

The aspect of destruction pervading Sagorsky's painting expresses a release from the framed, often measured nature of photography. Some of the forms invoked bear likeness to ones present in the artist’s photography, but on paper find themselves endangered, obeying a system with radically different hierarchies and rules. They are transposed to spaces of danger: overturned, absorbed, melted and trampled – in order to disrupt the order in which Sagorsky usually works—and by doing so surprise him, too.