Mercedes Llanos

Mercedes Llanos creates visceral paintings in which she replicates animated, somewhat grotesque scenes from her dreams. Llanos frequently speaks of the deep patriarchal currents which ran through her upbringing in Mar del Plata, Argentina. This societal makeup informed the binary divide of labour in Llanos’ household, the artist found the hyper-sexualisation of women’s bodies inescapable, as was the hypocritical repression of women’s sexuality. Using painting as a medium to exercise these frustrations, Llanos mixes oils with charcoals, pastels, chalk and sometimes menstrual blood, to craft large-scale works which demand a bodily response from the viewer. Appearing like liberated spirits, Llanos’ female figures drape across the canvas, representing intense pleasure or pain and their bodies free of anatomical limits. Lllanos cites Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as key influences upon her painterly style, with Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard and Monet being particular insperations for the artist. The fluidity of Llanos’ brushstrokes and the porous relationship between the figures and the surrounding composition mirrors the amorphous tone of these painters, yet her constant investigation into the complexity of female desire carves out a particular context for Llanos to operate within. ...

Balice Hertling was founded in 2007 by Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling. Balice Hertling has hosted the debut solo shows of many artists like Camille Blatrix, Xinyi Cheng and Isabelle Cornaro—all of whom have gone on to earn widespread recognition. From 2012 to 2016, gallery founders Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling operated a project space in Manhattan. Returning to France in 2017, they relocated the main gallery to Paris’ Marais district and transformed the former Belleville location into a space for curated projects and shows by younger artists. Indeed, many artists represented by the gallery exemplify unique subcommunities of the emergent art world. This breadth of representation also translates to a breadth of medium, as the gallery represents painters as well as artists working in mixed media such as film, performance and sculptural objects. The gallery also represents artists whose careers are more established : British conceptual artist Stephen Willats, Syrian-born painter and sculptor Simone Fattal, and Italian artist Enzo Cucchi. In its programming and practices, Balice Hertling constantly works toward creating a more diverse and equitable art landscape. In this spirit, the gallery is proud to represent the Estate of Behjat Sadr, who was the first woman artist to be recognized as a modern master in Iran. As a result of the pandemic, the gallery co-founded « Palai » in the summer of 2021, a yearly exhibition hosting a small group of galleries from around the world, in historic locations in Lecce, a city in Italy's Puglia region. Palai is neither a curated exhibition nor a fair, it is thought to be a version of a residency, a collegial collaboration, where artists, galleries, and friends of the art world come together. In 2021 Balice Hertling relocated and brought closer both spaces in the Marais with a new main space inaugurated by a Ser Serpas scultpure solo show, and a new showroom and project space on rue de Montmorency. ...