Cafè La Borsa

Location CENTRO

Guest:

Gunel Rzayeva
3792318389
r.gunel8@gmail.com
Instagram

Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, Gunel Rzayeva began painting in her home country, but chose to refine her technique in Italy, studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, where she graduated in 2025. Deeply connected to the city she now calls home, she enthusiastically took part in the public art project “Roses for Carrara,” sharing the desire to contribute to the local cultural scene alongside many other artists. Gunel maintains a strong bond with her roots, which is reflected in the use of intense, Eastern-inspired colors. She loves to experiment with collage, combining materials and techniques to amplify the visual impact of her works. She was awarded third prize at the 2nd Painting and Poetry Exhibition “Dialogues of Art between Hills and Sea” in Luni (SP).

Despite her young age, she has already participated in numerous group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. The most recent was Oltre i Muri, held at Palazzo Banci Buonamici, the seat of the Province of Prato. She also recently concluded her first solo show in Italy, hosted by the Aglio e Oglio space in Carrara. During Carrara Studi Aperti, her works will be exhibited at the historic Caffè della Borsa on Via Roma in Carrara.

At Caffè della Borsa, she will present a selection of works that best represent her artistic vision. She will exhibit three pieces created using different printmaking techniques, into which she has inserted elements that appear thematically dissonant or disruptive but that harmoniously interact with the matrix through line and color. This visual “non-sense” effect is intended to disorient the viewer, suspending them outside of time and beyond conventional technical frameworks.

In line with her ongoing exploration of identity and the relationship between the human soul and its social environment, she will also exhibit two oil paintings from the series 28 – Day of Mirror Work, a cycle composed of 28 self-portraits (20x25 cm format), each depicting her face reflected in a mirror over a 28-day period. In these works, she seeks to express her emotional states, interpreting the passage of time on her face through personal and social events that affected her directly, leaving an emotional trace through varying techniques and chromatic combinations.

She is deeply in love with color and with the ways it interacts with the physical limits of the painting. Her aesthetic research constantly strives to find harmony between elements and materials that differ in nature and meaning, experimenting with new techniques that allow matter and concept to enter into dialogue. Hers is a deeply personal aesthetic, where line and color move in response to her emotional state and to external events — whether personal, social, or political — influencing her production directly or indirectly, through the lens of her biography.