Shirley Villavicencio Pizango’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, A tear for power, opens on June 27.

In A tear for power, Villavicencio Pizango presents a new body of work exploring the fragile boundary between self-image and self-absorption. Through intimate portraits and emotionally charged compositions, the exhibition approaches narcissism not simply as vanity, but as a vulnerable desire for recognition, control, and love.

Drawing from personal memory, cultural symbolism, and everyday encounters, the artist creates paintings that balance tenderness with confrontation. In A tear for power, vulnerability and power become inseparable, revealing the emotional complexity that lies beneath the surface of identity.

Shirley Villavicencio Pizango (Lima, PE). Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. Graduated from KASK and HISK in Ghent, Belgium.

Villavicencio Pizango participated in the Paradise Air Residency in Matsudo, Japan in 2017.

Having grown up in the Peruvian capital of Lima and the small village of Santiago De Borja in the Amazon rainforest, Shirley Villavicencio Pizango moved to Ghent, Belgium when she was eighteen years old. Fourteen years later, Villavicencio Pizango has nicely reconciled these diverse experiences to record her daily life in Ghent by painting portraits of family, friends and strangers. She portrays her sitters within lush vegetation and amidst textiles, pottery and geometric forms reminiscent of Incan sources. Her paintings are colorful, loose, expressionistic and folky and her sitters are depicted with a concise sensitivity that conveys nostalgia, memory and melancholy.