Adriana Oliver (Barcelona, Spain, 1990) is an artist who develops her work in the field of painting as main support, with an approach that comes from Pop Art and that resonates in post minimalism, conceptually guided by issues around contemporary social life and feminism. In a very particular way it relates the individual with mass culture and the media, working with the repetition and obstruction / abstraction of the faces of their characters. In her first exhibition in Brazil, she presents recent works that follow her pictorial research, after exhibitions in Spain, Canada and the United States.
Her paintings demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction in the second half of the twentieth century. This global connection that makes us more “connected” is the one that makes this the moment of greatest individualism and loneliness. The artist challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our "cannibal" and "civilized" selves. By demonstrating the ubiquitous persistence of a "corporate and global world," she creates work that appears fascinated by clarity of content but results in an image that is both distant and dreamlike.
Their faceless men and women resonate with the 1950s advertisers, described in the book by James B. South and Rod Carveth's Mad Man (which was later made into a blockbuster TV series). As in the book, Adriana, in highlighting these mysterious and well-dressed characters, uses Pop figuration to discuss power relations, misogyny, machismo. In a larger context, they refer to postcolonial theory and the avant-garde democratic movement as a way of resisting the logic of savage capitalism that gave rise to pop art in the 1950s but is now taken up by the artist as a symbol of resistance.