Balances: Monique Rollins and David Row

THE EXHIBITION IS EXTENDED UNTIL NOVEMBER 22 WITH THE FOLLOWING HOURS:

Wednesday 29, Thursday 30 and Friday 31 October, from 4 PM to 8 PM
Saturday 1 November from 5 PM to 11 PM, Night of Contemporary Arts

Oct. 31, Nov. 1 and 2, 10 AM – 12 PM BREAKFASTS AT THE GALLERY with

then continues during the gallery’s regular opening hours:

Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 4 PM to 7 PM.

In Balances, an abstract landscape that oscillates between impulse and measure, emotion and structure takes shape between Monique Rollins and David Row.

Rollins’ canvases are traversed by waves of color that seem to breathe: luminous layers, fluid gestures, and chromatic vibrations that translate intimate memories and vital energies. Her painting is movement, rhythm, emotional tension that becomes image.

Row, on the contrary, entrusts his research to calibrated geometric shapes and suspended color fields. In his works, the silence of structure becomes a meditative space, a fragile balance between order and discontinuity.

Juxtaposed, the two languages do not cancel each other out but amplify: Rollins’ gestural force finds a counterpoint in Row’s precision; the urgency of color meets the calmness of form. In this encounter, abstraction reveals its plural nature, capable of containing both the vertigo of feeling and the clarity of construction.

Juxtaposing the works of Monique Rollins and David Row, abstraction opens into a double breath: in Rollins, gesture and color expand into emotional landscapes, while in Row’s compositions, life itself takes shape. The more massive signs are our certainties, interrupted by unexpected thin lines and contrasting colors, representing the unforeseen events that burst into the vital flow, modifying its perspective and perception, all enclosed in an irregular perimeter that recalls the limited visual field of humans.

Both artists narrate the experience of living, but with different abstract languages: impulsive colored gesturality on one side, calm geometric rigor on the other.

The exhibition opens on September 18 on the occasion of two events:

TAG Ouverture Thursday, September 18 from 4 PM to 11 PM

Exhibi.to Open Gallery Weekend, from Thursday, September 18 to Saturday, September 20 from 4 PM to 9 PM

Reservations are required for the Tours at exhibitotorino@gmail.com or +39 3520718200

Monique Rollins, born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1980, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Syracuse University, New York, in 2002. She then deepened her artistic studies with a Master of Science in Theory, Criticism, and History of Art, specializing in Venetian Renaissance, as well as a Certificate in Museum Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York.
D Rollins’ practice spans oil and acrylic painting, charcoal drawing, and paper collage on canvas. She works across multiple media, including pencil, acrylic, watercolor, pen and ink, and, in her most recent production, textile materials.

David Row (Portland, Maine, 1949) is one of the leading figures in American abstract painting. He studied at Yale University with influential masters such as Al Held and Lester Johnson. His years at Yale placed him within the lineage of American abstraction, which he has since developed into a personal language that merges geometric rigor with lyrical tension. His work is currently on view in New York, through January 17, 2026, in the group exhibition Building Models: The Shape of Painting, curated by Saul Ostrow at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, NY.