SOUTHFIRST gallery is proud to present SPACE STUDY, the first New York solo show of Portugese artist Ana Cardoso. The exhibition consists of nine large-scale paintings and a number of smaller interventions which assemble to create an installation that maps the gallery space through two- and three-dimensional signs and displacements. The exhibition will be on view from November 7 – December 14, 2008.

SPACE STUDY began as an animated video “sketch” of SOUTHFIRST gallery and the plan for a black-on-black invitation card. In her show, Cardoso plays with the dual presence of paintings as objects and signs to create an architectural space in which literally free-floating references collide. Themes of the paintings include translucent fabric with different warp and weft, 1970s social theory book covers, and voracious pop cultural and art historical quotations including Fragonard’s “The Swing.” Michel Majerus, Heimo Zobernig, and Cosima von Bonin might be artists whose approaches to the legacy of painting make them relevant to Cardoso’s approach to the problem of making art, which Cardoso suggests is a kind of performance.

Ana Cardoso received an MFA from Hunter College in 2006. She has shown most recently with E-Flux Video Rental at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and at VPF Gallery, Lisbon, and in St. Louis, Missouri as a part of Cinema Zero. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Lisbon.