Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Luisa Rabbia entitled Inferno. This is Rabbia's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be presented at 176 Grand Street, New York. There will be an artist’s reception Thursday, March 30, from 6 – 8pm. The exhibition runs through May 20, 2023.

Throughout her career, Luisa Rabbia’s work has explored the psychosocial nuances of humanity from the individual to the collective experience. Her intuitive and emotional approach leaves behind a collection of traces on the surface of the canvas that while evoking temporality also allow for reflections on the spiritual.

In her newest series, taking visual cues from Sandro Botticelli’s Map of Hell (1480-1495)—a key drawing from a series of 92 commissioned to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy—Rabbia reimagines Hell within the landscape of the human body. She eschews religious connotations to instead investigate more personal, terrestrial Hells that are part of the human experience. In the works, Botticellli’s circles of Hell become rib cages, their bodies stripped bare of skin and flesh as Rabbia excavates the surface, scraping away paint to reveal visceral, expressive worlds of inner turmoil.

The exhibition Inferno will present a group of large oil on canvas paintings as well as a series of nine works on paper titled The Inferno, Broken in Nine Pieces, which specifically represents conditions such as anxiety, helplessness, loss, separation, war, loneliness, injustice, and pregnancy with an unwanted child. The paintings expand on this theme to include manifestations of evil using the same corporeal composition, thereby further addressing the nature of suffering in the world today.

"(...) Abuse is perhaps one of the most disturbing works in this cycle. Where Botticelli depicts Lucifer in his Map of Hell as an elusive celestial semicircle which becomes a magnifying glass to enlarge the Devil’s entire silhouette, Rabbia depicts the visage of a victim, their mouth open in a frozen cry. In horrifying contortion, the spinal column is stuck inside their teeth, burning along with the rest of the inverted skeleton. The figure’s hands lie helpless on the monochrome blue background in a sign of defeat and psychic separation from the pain that the body is registering. The echo of another frozen cry—Francis Bacon’s iterations of Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X—resounds in the repeated openings in Rabbia’s skeleton, forming the shape of an “o”(…). A formal dialogue with Bacon is also present in this work, as both artists share a violence in harsh and vibrant vertical gestures, which make up the background and the form of the seated Pope in one work, and explode the neck and jawbone in the other, as the red crayon is repeatedly scrawled up and down or scratched away." 

— Veronica Santi, The Inferno, Broken in Nine Pieces

"The title of this drawing is The Unwanted Child because it is indeed a hell to be carrying an unwanted child, and it is a hell to be unwanted as a child."

— Luisa Rabbia