Twine, wood and fabric are some of the materials chosen by Ana Prata to compose the pieces of her first solo exhibition at Galeria Millan. Opening on June 5th, The Sun and the Difference marks a new phase in the artist’s work, in which she diversifies the media for her paintings, dedicating herself to a more symbolic representation and to abstraction.
From the use of uncommon materials emerges an objectual character, beyond the traditional oil on canvas. “Different media and materials may interest me while creating a painting, since each of them is a unit of thought or an idea, which manifests itself through the body of an object and its appearance. I am interested in the uniqueness of each piece,” says Ana.
This liberation concerning the media also allowed for greater freedom in the themes of her paintings in this new phase. If until then the artist based the composition of her works predominantly on images she found on the Internet, now imagination has become a central point of her creations. This change led to the rise of symbolic, archaic figures, which offer a synthetic view of nature, beyond experimentation with purely geometric and abstract shapes.
Present in the title and in several works in the exhibition, the Sun emerges as a rare symbol of unity in a collection marked by diversity, a characteristic that has been maintained by Ana Prata. For her, the representation of this element refers to the early stages, to the caves, to children’s drawings. And it is precisely through this search for simplicity that Ana’s work deepens and matures, coming closer to forms shared by human imagination.