Gabriela Farnell

You describe yourself as self-taught. What key moments or discoveries shaped your development as an artist without formal academic training?

The joy of drawing that was typical of childhood, in my case, was preserved over the years. I drew constantly and uninterruptedly, acquiring a remarkable skill with practice that continued to develop. In adolescence, when you’re supposed to discover your vocation, it was obvious to me that all I wanted to do was keep drawing. At 15 or 16, I tried to enter an art academy, but it didn’t work out. I wanted to continue drawing my way, freely and whimsically, experimenting and learning from mistakes. But above all, I wanted to maintain the joy, the total delight in doing so, the playful pleasure of drawing for the sake of drawing, which fortunately persists to this day.

Gabriela Farnell | De Picas | 2025

Borges and the idea of “universalism” appear in your statement. Which authors, thinkers, or visual artists—Argentine or international—have most inspired your creative outlook?

Borges is a great teacher of readers, a kind and confident guide to delving into universal literature. Borges encapsulates the spirit of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century, curious and open to all cultures, eager to discover and incorporate the manifestations of art in all its disciplines. Victoria Ocampo, Xul Solar, Macedonio Fernández, and Bioy Casares are exponents of a wonderful era, where education and culture went hand in hand. Borges extended that spirit to my generation, who grew up in houses with libraries where Stevenson, Carroll, Poe, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud lived. And in Buenos Aires, you can visit glorious works by Eduardo Sivori, Prilidiano Pueyrredón, and de la Cárcova at the Museum of Fine Arts, and even enjoy several Rubens, Goyas, and a Van Gogh. I am privileged to have grown up in a city where culture is something that inhabits its streets every day.

Paper is central to your work, and you subject it to fire, water, and intentional tearing. Can you share what attracts you to these transformations and how chance accidents influence the final piece?

There’s a lot of play and challenges in my creative process. Starting with a sheet of paper, drawing on it, and then intentionally destroying it with fire, to see what remains. And from there, reconstructing the image, overcoming the obstacles of paper fragmentation and scorching. On the one hand, I constantly challenge myself to improve, to overcome the difficulties of drawing on a broken support. But at the same time, reconstructing a damaged image, perhaps definitively ruined in the eyes of others, and recovering it more defined, powerful, and more beautiful, enriched by the work done, represents an allegory for me of the human spirit in the face of life’s difficulties. They can hit you, break you, give you up for lost, but you can always remerge, better than before, more authentic and unique. We are all what we have laboriously rebuilt after our personal shipwrecks.

Gabriela Farnell | Reina De Bastos | 2025

Your recent series blends meticulous drawing with collage-like layers of text and symbolism. Could you walk us through the typical stages of creating one of these works?

My work tends to mix everything, from the different types of paper supports to the design, where I fuse classic portraits with symbols, icons, and texts of cultural significance. This combination, like a collage of overlapping and blended but entirely drawn images, attempts to tell the viewer a story, which will be translated from the viewer’s own experience, giving it an absolutely personal significance. As if it were an intimate interplay between the work and each person who stops to contemplate it. As many stories as there are people who connect with each work, the possibility of multiple dialogues between them.

Gabriela Farnell | Reina De Copas | 2025

You speak of decoding universal culture from “the southernmost south of the Americas.” How does living and working in Buenos Aires shape your global artistic vision today?

As I mentioned before, Borges symbolizes the universality inherent to Buenos Aires, where almost all of us have grandparents from some European country, where our neighbor comes from the Middle East, and at school we share classrooms with children from almost every country in the Americas. Buenos Aires is a city of fusion, of generous blending, where we summarize universal culture around a bar table, where we all meet over a coffee break. Blending, kindness, and a desire to share the game are the environment where I grew up and live, and they definitely mark and define my work.

Many of your images feature powerful female archetypes like queens and goddesses. What do these figures mean to you personally and conceptually?

In recent years, I’ve been working on the aesthetics of the 1930s and 1940s, using the faces of actresses from that era as a model, with their languid yet powerful expressions. Women who convey a wealth of experience behind a distant gaze or a hint of a smile. Women who, even when they found themselves within a structured system, found a way to break away and assert themselves through their individuality, breaking historical and cultural impositions. I try to capture in my work that infinite possibility of the feminine spirit, of being and doing many things at once without losing calm.

Gabriela Farnell | Reina De Corazones | 2025

You have exhibited since 1992 and embraced the “democratization” of the art market through the internet. How has the online art world transformed your career and the way audiences experience your work?

The internet has become a wonderful tool. I’ve been able to experience the before (when we were limited to showing our work in a single, local location and relying on third parties—art dealers or gallery owners—to cross physical borders) and the after, the now, when we can freely interact with people from all over the world and show our work without restrictions. This exchange can be challenging in that you expose yourself to rejection and criticism, but that’s precisely what allows your work to mature, to define itself, to advance toward a universal language, that possibility of being accessible to anyone, regardless of their tradition or origin, which I believe is what defines art.