Collection: Roberta Gattel

Introduction

Roberta Gattel (born 1990) is an Italian visual artist, illustrator, and scholar based in the United Kingdom. She graduated in Venice in Painting and in Philosophy. She specialized in History, in Intercultural and Postcolonial Studies and she recently completed a MA in Women's Studies at the University of York, in England. She has experience working as a Literature, History and Philosophy teacher in Italian state schools, collaborating with independent publishing houses and international magazines, both as author and illustrator, and she is currently continuing her studies in England as a researcher in the field of Gender Studies.

She is interested in women’s history, in working class women’s agency, in the socio-economic barriers that prevent working-class women from accessing knowledge and higher education, and in epistemic gender-based violence. She is also passionate about the relation between personal and political; the role of the stereotype in the construction of ideas; the deconstruction of rhetorical devices; the role of emotions in knowledge-building; the invisibility of discriminated categories in cultural spaces; and the relationship between patriarchy, colonialism and climate disaster. Her work is characterized by an intersectional approach that takes into account gender, race, class, sexuality, colonialism and disability, with a strong focus on contemporary politics and on Global South feminisms.

Artistic process

Gattel's artistic process has been marked by a constant relationship between study and drawing, which the artist perceives as complementary. Gattel has never been able to separate her academic research from her artistic production: they have constantly fed and stimulated each other, helping her reflect and decipher reality, and transmit content. Her imaginative universe is nourished by her knowledge of Western classics (Gattel studied Latin and Ancient Greek for years), by a strong passion for modern and contemporary Literature (which led her to become an author herself), and by an unquenchable curiosity about History, its narratives, and its instrumental uses. Reflections of her humanistic background can be found throughout her artistic production, from her first drawings in 2010 to her latest installations in 2025, which show literary quotations, artistic and cinematic cameos, references to historical and contemporary events. The underlying theme of Gattel’s research is highly reflexive and relational, and aimed at the pursuit of social justice. 

Gattel’s artistic practice is procedural and characterised by research-based projects where the medium and the techniques always follow the research question. Her creative investigation focuses both on visual approach, concentrating on drawing, on the use of images and photographs, and on critical writing, using auto-ethnography and reflexivity as methodologies.

Roberta Gattel Drawing | Article | Photo |

Website

Poetic

Drawing represents the starting point of Gattel’s research, both as a tool for visual investigation and as a space for reflection. For Gattel, figuration is the most suitable medium for establishing a direct and intimate relationship with the image. It creates the space for observing, studying, narrating reality, and the possibility for connecting with the viewer. 

The monochromy of the pencil amplifies the sign, allowing the different levels of suspension on which Gattel constructs the scene to emerge, between an intimate, almost diary-like dimension and a theatrical, voyeuristic one. Moving between observation, introspection and representation, Gattel uses drawing as an intimate and necessary practice, capable of questioning the gaze and the way in which the body is seen, experienced and described.

For Gattel people and the reality they belong to are both complex products of self and hetero-relationships. She is fascinated by dualisms, by the oscillation of human impulses: the attention to oneself and the love for each other, the attempt at dialogue, and the tragic epilogue of incommunicability. It is for this reason that she researched contact between different shapes and languages on the paper: she worked on both sides of the sheet. And her work emerges as the result of this tension. Her research therefore focuses on making as a cognitive act, in which the work does not communicate a message, but rather makes evident an experience of confrontation.

She uses the size of her drawings as a political provocation, critically reconstructing the connection between the teaching she received as a female child to occupy as little space as possible and her inability to work on large formats even as an adult. The small size of her drawings is now her manifesto and the trademark of several projects.

EXHIBITION

2026 Group show, space 776, New York (forth coming)

          Solo Exhibition, Venice (forth coming

2025 Refreshment, Group Show, Space 776, New York 

          Satellite art Fair, GyaGyaGya(Tokyo), Miami

2024~2027 Curatorial project, ART NYC

2018 perASPERA Festival, Bologna, Italy. Selected participant for XI edition of Contemporary Arts Festival.

2017 101st Young Artists Collective, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venice, Italy. Group       exhibition curated by A. C. Bellati, M. L. Brunelli, P. Forni and S. Cecchetto.

2016 "Terre Ferme", Collective Exhibition curated by S. S. De Burgis. Atelier 3+10, Mestre, Italy.