Adrianne Gallinari attended the Guignard School in Belo Horizonte. In 1997 she obtained the Guillermo Kuitca scholarship for young artists, which enabled her to move to Buenos Aires, where she won the Bridgestone Biennial Award at the Borges Cultural Centre in 2000. She currently lives in Sao Paolo.

She works mainly in painting and drawing, but also in video, ceramics and illustration to a lesser extent. Her pictures are characterised by the subtlety and economy of her brush-strokes. They are sketches that hint at human figures and natural forms, which she sets against fabulous, dreamlike landscapes in scenes that are disturbing in their simplicity, exuding a false naiveté that transports viewers to the no less disturbing territory of memories of children's stories. A case is point is Landscape (2007), a large-sized work built up from superimposed layers that weave a fantastic, unreal setting.

Gallineri's world shows itself to be all the more distressing in works such as those on the walls of the Drawing Centre in New York (2000).

Art critic Jenni Sorkin had this to say: 'Writing becomes drawing and drawing becomes a process of projection, conjecture, assumption and feeling. The heavy, hurried script – without breaks, punctuation, corrections or self-censorship – could be read as a cathartic diary, an ambivalent litany, a confession, or a mapping of loss tinged with desire'. Sketches that look like writing to the point where they become confused with manuscripts, inscriptions and microgrammes; words and traces that call for new forms of reading and interpretation.

Adrianne Gallinari's work has been shown at solo exhibitions at the Casa Triângulo in São Paulo (2001, 2003 & 2007), the Pampulha Art Museum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2001) and the Drawing Center in New York (2000). She has also taken part in collective exhibitions such as the Pontevedra Art Biennial (2000) and the Buenos Aires Contemporary Drawing Biennial (2001).

Beatriz Herráez