Opening: 04 April from 17h
Gallery treppe B at Corbusierhaus Berlin
Flatowallee 16, 14055 Berlin
Souvenir is Gemma Solà Sotos first solo exhibition, where she explores a sense of generational melancholy, weaving it into a visual language that feels both personal and universal.
Her paintings speak to a longing for stability, using recurring symbols—empty chairs in vast, desolate landscapes, solitary animals, wine glasses, and drifting smoky clouds—to evoke a world caught between memory, dreams and reality. Her work plays with contrasts. Bright colors sit against the stillness of her compositions, where figures remain frozen in time.
“I use bright, vivid colors that suggest optimism and a kind of playfulness, but I apply them with loud, aggressive brushstrokes. This contrast reflects the tension between the hope with which we were raised and the reality we’re facing now.”
Through these juxtapositions, her paintings capture a sense of quiet tension, inviting viewers to reflect on the space between hope and resignation. In her latest body of work, the swan has emerged as a central motif. A symbol that has stood for grace and purity now carries an undertone of stillness, even stagnation. She paints it unmoving, adrift in quiet isolation, a reflection of a generation that feels stuck, suspended between past expectations and an uncertain future.
Solà Sotos draws inspiration from both personal experience and broader societal shifts. Whether working on canvas or paper, her mixed-media approach blends digital influences with traditional techniques, creating layers of meaning that echo the fast-moving, fragmented nature of modern life. Historical and literary references—particularly the use of isolation and existential melancholy seen in the works of Spanish Romantics, a movement characterised by a profound emphasis on individualism, emotional depth, and a fascination with nature and the past—find their way into her work, bridging past and present in a meditation on longing, nostalgia, and disillusionment.
This exhibition invites viewers into these in-between spaces, where contrasts merge and symbols take on new weight. It’s a reflection on what it means to yearn for something just out of reach, to search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly unstable, and to sit with the quiet ache of nostalgia in everyday life.
Gemma Solà Sotos (born 1993 in Barcelona, Spain) studied between 2014 and 2018 at the University of Barcelona, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with special distinction. In 2018, she moved to Munich, Germany, to continue her education at the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Gregor Hildebrandt, where she gradatued in February 2024. She currently lives and works in Vienna.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Galerie Probst
