Paula Cooper Gallery is delighted to return to Frieze Masters with a solo presentation of works by Beatrice Caracciolo, as part of the Studio section curated by Sheena Wagstaff. The booth will present a selection of works dating from 1999 to the present, and will include works on canvas, collages, sculpture, photogravures and etchings, as well as a selection of objects and ephemera from the artist’s studio.

Beatrice Caracciolo’s work captures ideas related to the reality of vision and expressive movement. Pre-existing imagery is distilled to the brink of abstraction, as she teases out pictorial elements of the rendering of landscapes, Rococo, Baroque or Renaissance allegories, or architectural components, evoking a sensuous minimalism.
 
Caracciolo uses a reduced range of colours that add tonal value or volume to the vigorous black lines that dominate her canvasses, generating the signature vibrancy and dynamism of her practice. Initially made on paper, the paintings are sometimes rubbed, scratched, and submerged in water to achieve a rich surface texture, before being mounted on canvas. Sculptures of weathered zinc plates and found wood pieces are similarly allusive and tactile.
 
Drawing on a scope of influences, Caracciolo’s work has affinities with Arte Povera, the material activism of Joseph Beuys, as well as Chinese landscape painting. Most recently, specific oil paintings by Tiepolo, Trevisani, and Breughel have been the point of departure for whole series of works. Caracciolo’s monochromatic distillation of these familiar compositions and characters reconnects their allegories of ignorance, massacre of innocent children, and metaphorical blindness to contemporary political reality.

Sheena Wagstaff
Creative Advisor of Frieze Masters

Beatrice Caracciolo (b. 1955, São Paulo, Brazil) is an Italian artist based in Paris. Caracciolo recently premiered a new body of work inspired by Breughel's Parable of the Blind (Paula Cooper Gallery, 2024). Recent one-person exhibitions include Innocenti at Paula Cooper Gallery (2020); Créer en soi le dragon de feu, at the Temple Collection in Beijing (2016); … pour que passe enfin mon torrent d’anges at the Château de Haroué in Haroué, France (2012); and Tumulti at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici (2010). Works by the artist are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Morgan Library, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.