On the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2026, the Maurizio Nobile Fine Art gallery presents De la tierra, lo frágil, a solo exhibition by Uruguayan artist Augusto Gadea, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1989 and living in Bologna. The exhibition stems from the meeting between Gadea and gallery owner Attilio Luigi Ametta, developed on the basis of mutual esteem and a shared vision: to investigate through art the universal condition of human frailty. The gallery thus confirms its commitment to supporting the most important contemporary artistic research, providing a space where art stimulates reflection on the present and deepest emotions. Gadea’s work is characterized by the use of earth as a pictorial material. The artist personally collects soil samples in the places he visits, initiating a journey from the surface of the ground to deeper dimensions. From the sediments, often invisible and overlooked in everyday life, Gadea obtains the raw material for landscapes and portraits that combine memory, living matter and reflection on time. This practice has evolved over the years through a collaboration with the National Research Council in Bologna, becoming a pictorial language capable of combining historical influences and contemporary sensibility.
De la tierra, lo frágil focuses on portraiture from life as a tool to explore the human condition. The subjects portrayed are young faces selected for their ability to convey inner fragility. The project began in February last year, when during a previous gallery exhibition the gaze of a young visitor showed genuine emotion in front of a work, revealing a pure feeling that defined the direction of the entire work. The portraits presented in the exhibition show a balance between essentiality and intensity. Gadea’s painting is representation and substance: the features of the faces flake away, the contours dissolve, the pigments aggregate. The use of earth makes it possible to highlight the inherent vulnerability of the human being, turning each work into a silent reflection on the fragility and impermanence of life. The landscapes and portraits share the same material language, in which the fragile material becomes a vehicle for an emotional and conceptual discourse consistent with the artist’s poetics.
Through De la tierra, lo frágil, Gadea explores the interaction between matter and meaning, between memory and perception. The exhibition proposes an investigation of time and emotions, suggesting the viewer to confront his or her own vulnerability. The artist’s approach represents an attempt to reconcile contemporary sensibilities and ancient practices, giving new relevance to natural materials and manual processes often forgotten in the context of contemporary art. The choice to directly collect and use earth as pigment transforms the pictorial gesture into an act of observation and relationship with the surrounding world, keeping at the center of reflection the human being and his condition of fragility.
Gadea was awarded the National Painting Prize at the Visual Arts Exhibition in Uruguay in 2014, when he was only twenty-five years old, with the work Tierra de nadie, now in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo. Since then he has exhibited in numerous institutions in Italy and abroad. Notable exhibitions include En las tierras re-vueltas at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montevideo (2018), I luoghi della polvere, with critical text by Raffaele Milani, at Galleria Studio Cenacchi in Bologna (2019), and the various stages of the project Atlas of Lands, carried out in collaboration with the CNR, up to the installation inside the Hypogeous Village of the Archaeological Park of Sant’Antioco (2025).
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| Augusto Gadea in Bologna for ART CITY 2026 with De la tierra, lo frágil |
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