Augusto Gadea: De la tierra, lo frágil

On the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2026, to be held from February 5 to 8, Maurizio Nobile Fine Art presents De la tierra, lo frágil, a solo exhibition by Augusto Gadea (Montevideo, 1989), a Uruguayan artist who has been living and working in Bologna for many years.

The project was born from an encounter between the artist and the gallerist Attilio Luigi Ametta, from a mutual esteem that immediately emerged, and from a shared vision: to investigate, through art, one of the deepest and most universal conditions of the human being—fragility.
With this event, the gallery renews its commitment to supporting the most profound and meaningful contemporary artistic research, offering a space in which art can prompt reflection on our time and, at the same time, on our most intimate emotions.

Augusto Gadea’s work is distinguished by the use of earth as a pictorial material. The artist personally collects soil samples from the places he visits, in a research process that moves from the surface of the land toward the abyssal. From these sediments—often invisible to the eye and overlooked in our daily lives—Gadea generates the raw material to depict landscapes and portraits that are at once memory, living matter, and a poetic reflection on time.
Over the years, thanks to an active collaboration with the National Research Council (CNR) in Bologna, this practice has evolved into a true pictorial language capable of uniting the influences of art of the past with contemporary sensibility.

With De la tierra, lo frágil, Gadea engages with portraiture from life as a key to accessing the human condition. The artist portrayed young faces chosen precisely for their ability to embody a profound sense of inner fragility. The models for the exhibited works were selected over time, but everything began during a gallery exhibition in February of last year, when the gaze of a young visitor betrayed an authentic emotion in front of a work, revealing a true and pure feeling that both the gallerist and the artist were seeking. From that moment on, the project came to life.

Gadea’s portraits are essential yet intense, constructed with the same fragile material as his landscapes: earth. In these works, painting is not only form but also substance. The features break apart, the contours dissolve, the pigments cluster together. All of this leads to the representation of the silent strength of human vulnerability.