Natalia González Martín

Borrowing the formal qualities of icon painting, Natalia Gonzalez Martin’s work explores the inscriptions of a cultural heritage on one’s physical body and moral codes. Placed in a bucolic setting, the figures represented are often adorned with detailed elements as delicate as fabrics, ripe tempting fruits and crawling insects. They are filled with historic symbolism, allowing us to pay attention to the traditions, gestures and habits we have inherited. Natalia’s work merges the characters from old fables with the constant supply of images we are subjected to daily aiming to blur the boundaries between divine, secular and earth in order to gesture towards other ways of desiring, feeling or being in the world, attuned to these paradoxes. Fragmentation suggests anteriority, decay and loss in relation to some superseded whole. As an antidote to this, the German tradition of Weltlandschaft painting (World’s Landscape), offers an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint where everything is depicted with hallucinatory detail, allowing the artist to compress the totality of the world in a painting. Natalia creates a synthesis of both these ideas; a totality in the fragment, permitting the viewer to project their own experiences onto these universal gestures. ...

Founded in 2012 in Geneva, Galerie Sébastien Bertrand primarily represents emerging international artists, while also collaborating with more established figures. Many of the gallery’s artists have held their first solo or European solo exhibitions there. Acting as both an incubator and a springboard, the gallery is committed to fostering artistic development and facilitating collaborations with prominent institutions.