BARCELONA.- In the Catalan capital, Villa del Arte Galleries has unveiled the exhibition, Françoise Nielly: Up-close. Following the success of her last sell out show held in Barcelona in December 2010, the artist has retuned to the city to showcase her new collection of paintings and silkscreens.

The artist Françoise Nielly has reached the hearts of many with her portraits and expressive paintings of the human body. Nielly’s work, which combines bright, bold colours and brush strokes that could pierce canvas, is establishing her as one of the most famous French artists of our time.

Françoise Nielly's painting is expressive, exhibiting a brute force, a fascinating vital energy. Oil and palette knife combine to sculpt her images from a material that is, at the same time, biting and incisive, carnal and sensual. Whether she paints the human body or portraits, the artist takes a risk: her painting is sexual, her colours free, exuberant, surprising, even explosive, the cut of her knife incisive, her colour pallet dazzling.

The exhibition, which was inaugurated today, and will be open to the public tomorrow, was unveiled to at a press conference this morning in the Villa del Arte gallery, where the pieces will be on display from 16th December 2011 to 15th January 2012.

“We are extremely pleased to have had this opportunity to organise another solo show by this dynamic artist in Spain”, said Bert van Zetten, one of the founders of Villa del Arte Galleries, “the success of her last show simply confirmed that her work is well received by the public in Barcelona, and also meets our primary objective of exhibiting work by our artists at the best international art fairs and, at the same time, bringing interesting work by foreign artists to Catalonia.”

Françoise Nielly stated, “I am thrilled to have another opportunity to be in Barcelona following the success of my exhibition here last year. My collaboration with Villa del Arte has given me the opportunity to show my work at prestigious art fairs around the world and in other great cities such as New York, Istanbul, Toronto and Moscow”. With regard to her work, the artist said, “Painting is like my spine; I couldn’t live without it. I have to use my knives to paint, or I would kill.”

Françoise Nielly lives in a world of images. She has explored the different facets of image all her life, through painting, photography, roughs, illustrations and virtual computer generated animated graphics. It is clear now that painting is her direction and her passion.

She gets her sense of space and construction from her father, who was an architect.
Growing up in the South of France where she lived between Cannes and Saint-Tropez, she was never far from the light, colour and atmosphere that permeate this region.

Resolutely inscribed in her epoch, she is an accomplished artist; 20 years of artistic expression explain the maturity of her work and the perfect mastery of her art.