Angelina Gualdoni, Demo: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607

Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Chicago based artist Angelina Gualdoni.

For the past few years Angelina Gualdoni's paintings have been engaged in a continuing dialogue between structures influenced by utopian architecture and the surrounding natural world. The dichotomy of Gualdoni's hard slick-edged structures and her lush, painterly portrayal of nature emphasize the organic verses the artificial. The resulting environments consist of over-saturated pastels dominated by elliptic and panoramic views of architecture that linger within the history of the future.

The deconstruction of the presupposed image of the future and the cyclical evolution of these ideas has led to Gualdoni's current body of work titled Demo . This new series of paintings is based on the 1999 demolition of the Horizons Pavilion, in Future World at Disney's Epcot Center. Horizons was an in-depth 15 minute ride-through attraction that brought viewers on a journey through the history of futuristic premonitions of what the 21st century was to behold. Audio-Animatronics described life in environments such as underwater cities, a desert farming community and a space colony. As the building was demolished its guts oozed and dripped and the minimal building became organic. Gualdoni's paintings of the fallen structure are embedded with muted tones and exploding blotches of painterly remains. Different phases of the demolition are represented as the structure morphs into a monstrous heap of dirtied hues and bright pulses that are making their way back into the earth. Demo suggests that the actual destruction and recycling of these expectations of the future is more prophetic than the revelations themselves.