Paolo Colombo

Baert Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Paolo Colombo. This will be Colombo’s second exhibition at the gallery.

The exhibition includes a number of works consisting of large scale watercolors and a carpet paired with its source-watercolor.

These paintings are declarations of space, balancing abstraction and figuration. In them, time’s traces shimmer with life in the enigmatic pool of consciousness. We see carefully scattered poppy flowers, hovering circles or organic shapes, escaping hares, a hedgehog showing its soft belly; a woman’s face. One enters these spaces by quiet invitation to thought distilled to its essentials. In the abstract pieces, traveling through as many as four planes: the mat crossed with painted lines that also cover a painted ground, washes underneath fabric-like surfaces and small circular windows to the paper beneath. These are places of soft blues, grays, greens, and pinks, rich yellows and magentas, creamy whites. The sign language of arrangement gives viewers a floating sensation from which we emerge refreshed, as from a garden or poem. Animals and flowers spring into being fully formed from the patient field of fine crossing lines-- invited, like us, from another side of the paper--or perhaps invoked as muses are, by song.

Poet and essayist Andrea Applebee

Paolo Colombo is a painter and curator based in Athens, Greece. He has written two collections of poetry: “Apostolos Michailides”, Agra and Qbox, Athens (2014); and “Not in Sleep Nor in Water”, Kiraathane, Istanbul (2021). He currently is the Art Advisor for the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. He curated the sixth Istanbul Biennial, the third Salonika Biennial and the second Mardin Biennial. He has exhibited in the UK, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United States.