“Continuity feels essential to me for the image to grow. There’s something that completes itself naturally through repetition and variation.”
A Cartography of Influence and Identity
Born in Resistencia, in Argentina’s Chaco province, and raised in Buenos Aires within a family of Piedmontese descent, Gabriela Stellino’s path into visual art was shaped early and with great care. Her upbringing was rich in support—parents who embraced her creative pursuits, and teachers who recognized her drive long before she could articulate it herself. After completing her education at the National Schools of Fine Arts, Stellino lived for a period in Brazil before settling in Germany in the late 1990s, where she continues her work as a visual artist. Each place she’s called home has left a lasting impression on her visual vocabulary, contributing distinct atmospheres and sensibilities that now echo through her paper constructions and animations.
She speaks of Brazil as the place where she learned “to see,” a formative shift that honed her perceptual sensitivities. Her mentors, including notable Argentine artists such as Pipo Ferrari and Roberto Paez, were instrumental in shaping her technical foundation and philosophical outlook. Germany, on the other hand, provided a sustained opportunity to engage deeply with her practice—offering both space and continuity. This triangulated influence—Argentina’s emotional resonance, Brazil’s visual awakening, and Germany’s disciplined freedom—forms the substrate of her artistic output.
Rather than defining her career by a single turning point, Stellino describes her evolution as gradual, marked by a series of deeply meaningful moments. One such milestone occurred in 2004, when she received a call from Franz Armin Morat, the prominent collector and patron. His inquiry—asking for “the painter Gabriela Stellino”—marked the beginning of a nearly two-decade-long relationship. Their collaboration culminated in her first solo exhibition at the Morat Institut für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, staged in the same room where she had once stood before a Giorgio Morandi exhibit. That moment of full-circle affirmation was both professional recognition and a personal crystallization of identity as an artist.
Gabriela Stellino: Animating Stillness, Painting Motion
Stellino’s signature project, Moving-Painting, occupies a distinctive space at the intersection of traditional painting and digital animation. Over the years, this body of work has given rise to two independent projects that share the same technique: Belebte Bilder and, later, BILDGESCHEHEN. Both explore, from different perspectives, the relationship between still imagery and digital movement. This long-term body of work began with fog-draped winter landscapes—where contours blurred and forms dissolved. These ethereal environments became the seed for a series of short animated sequences initiated between 2002 and 2004 and continued until 2019. Using watercolors on small sheets of paper, she constructed scenes where disappearance itself became a visual event. Each piece is first rendered by hand, then digitized and animated, and finally presented as a paired installation: painting alongside projection, inviting the viewer into a dialogue between stillness and movement.
Across 49 completed sequences, Stellino’s Moving-Painting doesn’t just animate images—it brings visibility to moments when form seems to recede. The visual transitions don’t dramatize change but allow for a subtle unfolding, capturing the poetic state between emergence and dissolution. This attention to the understated reflects not only her technical range but also a philosophical inclination toward nuance and restraint. The effect is a kind of meditative space—neither strictly narrative nor abstract—where the sensory logic of color and rhythm holds sway.
In recent years, her attention has turned toward three-dimensional paper works. While the materials remain consistent—watercolor, ink, relief—her approach has shifted toward spatial complexity. Projects like Kabinettformat, Ziehzeit, and Bewegtes Relief extend her formal inquiries into the tactile realm, drawing on cut-outs, collages, and sculptural drawing techniques. What ties these series together is not just their material continuity, but an enduring commitment to intimate formats and a drive to test the limits of surface and depth. Even in abstraction, Stellino’s works seem to carry emotional inflections: subdued gestures of memory and presence, whispered through texture, shadow, and form.
In the Architecture of Process
Stellino’s studio, located in her home and accessible by appointment, reflects her working rhythm—disciplined yet flexible, attuned to the quiet persistence that fuels her practice. Her mornings begin with prepared materials, allowing her to enter directly into the act of creation. Four tables await her, each with colors already laid out and paper prepped from the day before. This method isn’t just about productivity—it’s a ritual that allows her to meet the work in a state of clarity. There’s no hesitation, only immersion. She operates on a principle of continuity: each image is the result of the previous one, forming a chain of ideas materializing through repetition and subtle variation.
Afternoons are reserved for teaching and managing the practical demands of an artist’s life—correspondence, class preparation, organizing submissions. This balance between solitary creation and social exchange grounds her practice in a sense of structure. Over time, this steady rhythm has generated an impressive body of work. She recently marked the creation of sheet number 7,245—an astounding testament to endurance and fidelity. This ongoing accumulation doesn’t feel like a race toward completion, but rather an unfolding conversation between the artist and her materials.
Her preference for small formats is more than aesthetic—it’s a decision rooted in the psychology of perception. Small works require close viewing, demanding attention and time. They invite intimacy, offering moments of quiet engagement in contrast to the spectacle often expected in contemporary art. Whether experimenting with pastel and torn paper, or exploring the emotional qualities of dissonant color harmonies, Stellino approaches each series as a question. How does color behave? What holds an image together? She answers not through words, but through persistent doing—where intuition and inquiry meet in material form.
Gabriela Stellino: Cut, Color, and Memory in Relief
Among her most resonant recent projects is Schiribizzi, a 2024 series of small-scale relief works created through precise paper cut-outs. These pieces are not merely decorative—they hold the emotional logic of memory. Through negative space, she creates openings for color to enter in ways that are deliberate, nuanced, and varied. Sometimes the hue is faint, watery, or translucent; at other times, it appears opaque and assertive. This play of contrast does more than define form—it evokes subtle emotional undertones. Color in Schiribizzi doesn’t just fill space; it glows with suggestion, hinting at feelings half-remembered or states just out of reach.
Another series, Dreidimensionale Papierarbeiten, advances this dialogue between flatness and volume. Here, the image does not sit obediently on the paper—it rises, curls, and extends into the surrounding air. Paper strips are precisely placed to create spirals and floating structures, with shadows that shift in response to light. These shadows are not incidental—they’re integral to the image’s completion. The forms don’t rely on glue but on careful interweaving, creating a balance between tension and delicacy. Each piece holds its own internal choreography, a kind of structural dance between light, form, and air.
Stellino’s material choices are never arbitrary. She has long favored Hahnemühle Büttenpapier for its weight and texture, which she finds especially compatible with the intimacy of small formats. Her attraction to paper lies not only in its tactility but also in its quiet resilience. In its fragility, she finds strength; in its simplicity, she uncovers depth. This sense of contradiction—of complex things hiding in modest forms—is at the core of her artistic identity. Even as she seeks foundation support for future projects, her intention remains steady: to continue exploring, expanding, and offering her work to audiences willing to pause, to look closely, and to listen to what the paper has to say.
