Drawing Now Art Fair

Since the 1990s, Gabriela Albergaria (1965, Vale de Cambra, Portugal), has been focusing the considerable diversity of her work on one central theme: nature.
The portuguese artist studies the specific features of gardens and landscapes and their role as testimonies to a nature that has been transported, tampered with, and conserved. Her work takes on diverse forms, such as photography, drawing, poetry, installation, sculpture and in situ intervention.
The artist plays with the effects of transformation, fermentation and fugacity, all of them major elements in the processes of nature, crucial to the renewal and sustainability of all forms of life.
Here, a first series of drawings is drawn from the red list of European vulnerable trees. A second series of pieces is inspired by Wendell Berry’s book The Work of Local Culture (1988). Gabriela Albergaria presents us with the results of her walks through Belgian and Portuguese forests, with a superposition of photography and drawings. These works offer an approach based on the experience of the landscape and the importance of the memories thus created. Considering the memory as a way of appropriating a beloved nature, without threatening its balance, forces us to take a new look at the existing relationship between humans and nature.
The results are these imagined landscapes where drawing and photography create a hybrid, between a photographic record of a moment in nature and a drawn appropriation of that landscape.