They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?: Angela Ferrari

Artist Bio:

b. 1990, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Ángela Ferrari studied at the National University of Art in Buenos Aires, and is an interdisciplinary artist, author and educator with a concentration in painting. In addition to her practice, she has published a short novel and has taught art in both community and academic settings. She has received multiple scholarships, and her work has been shown internationally including Tijuana, Guadalajara, Nayarit, Mexico City, Monterrey in Mexico; Cali in Colombia; Buenos Aires and San Martín de los Andes in Argentina; New York, Paris, Montreal, Shanghai and Seoul.

Her practice explores the boundary between nature and culture through a self-described “Grotesque-Passionate Baroque” style. She uses painting, sculpture, installation, and textiles to create charged visual worlds marked by intensity, sensuality, and layered symbolism. She now lives and works in Mexico City.

  In the final moments of Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Gloria—convinced she is incapable of surviving another day of suffering —asks her dance partner, Robert, to kill her, and so he does. “Why?” the policemen ask him:

“They shoot horses, don’t they?” 

    Therein Robert’s reply lies the tension of perspective at the heart of Ángela Ferrari’s latest exhibition. Entitled the same as the film, the exhibition features many horses—several more than the film, which isn’t really about horses at all. In this latest body of her work, the artist’s horses rear in lifelike scale across scenes of dramatic interaction between the animal and plant kingdoms in the titular works. 

    With this new body of work, Ferrari (1990, Argentina) is not interested in positioning the horse as a symbol of power, but rather in using the horse as a means of re-positioning our perspective on power itself. Depictions of horses when they know death is imminent are indelible to human’s capacity for empathy, and what is empathy if not a personal dedication to the understanding of myriad perspectives? Picasso’s “Guernica”; Artax’s death in The Neverending Story’s Swamps of Sadness; the distressed, rearing horse in Peter Paul Rubens's “The Rape of the Sabine Women;” Tony Soprano’s racehorse, Pie-O-My, euthanized after being severely burned in a stable fire. 

    Ferrari paints in collage-style layers of landscape that create compositions of tense perspective, which she achieves by rearranging vignettes in such a way as to obliterate traditional depth cues. What is typically background becomes foreground and vice versa. And furthermore, she plays with scale itself, producing a 5 by 15 foot diptych that hangs next to mini paintings measuring 10 by 15 centimeters. It’s a style idiosyncratically defined by the artist herself as  “Grotesque-Passionate Baroque,” one awash in a distinct Chiricoian palette of colors that speak to the metaphysical themes afoot in her work. A horse depicted rearing is a common element in Baroque art to convey a sense of violence and confusion in the scene, but in foregrounding her own depictions of these rearing creatures, she flips the inherent power of corporeal composition, and in turn, our relationship to the same. 

“I may not know a winner when I see one, but I sure as hell can spot a loser.”

-Rocky, They Shoot, Horses, Don’t They?

-Kaylen Ralph