IRL GALLERY is excited to present the US debut solo show of Eugenia Mussa, Hotstepper. The exhibition opens Friday April 14th 6-8pm and features 11 new paintings by the artist.
 
In this vibrant body of works - largely inspired by magazines, photographs, home-recorded youtube videos and memories - Eugenia Mussa’s work conveys fragments of collective human experience. By placing the characters at the center of the narrative through daily street scenes and collective activities, Mussa takes us for a ride into the sphere of human rituals and traditions, through the eyes of the flâneuse. 
 
Like forgotten postcards or old family photos, Eugenia Mussa’s paintings evoke a sense of beautiful nostalgia, and seem to blend historical references with personal memory. Mussa’s work possesses a cinematic, almost documentarian quality, while simultaneously maintaining a level of delicacy and painterly tradition. Her use of unconventional, bold colors adds to the timelessness of these scenes, while her experimentation with images seems drawn from a past suspended between continents. 
 
With Hotstepper, Eugenia Mussa unveils dense and colorful compositions, tinted with an enigmatic feel at times, and the sense that a glimpse into collective consciousness emerges from the immemoriality and the immediacy of her images. 

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Eugenia Mussa (b. 1978, Maputo) is a Mozambican-Portuguese contemporary artist. Mussa spent the first five years of her life in Mozambique, but later emigrated to Lisbon, Portugal due to the unfavorable conditions of the civil war. She currently lives and works in Lisbon.

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Selected Shows: 2023 Pintura sem fim, Centro Cultural BROTERIA, Lisbon (group); 2022 Easy Peasy, Monitor, Rome (solo); 2022 Tisanas: infusões para tempos próximos, Fundação Eugénio de Almeida, Évora (group); 2021 ROLLA/COSTA Let’s find out, Monitor, Lisbon (solo); 2021 Ladder to the moon, Monitor Rome (group); 2020 Artistas em Transito Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (group); 2019 Anozero – Coimbra Biennale of Contemporary Art, Coimbra