Julia Gallo: PRIMEIRA FEBRE

Yehudi Hollander-Pappi presents Primeira Febre, the debut solo exhibition by Julia Gallo May 12 – June 13, 2026 | São Paulo

Yehudi Hollander-Pappi is pleased to announce Primeira Febre, the gallery's first solo presentation of São Paulo-based artist Julia Gallo. The exhibition brings together works in charcoal, paper, and aluminum that trace the arc of a single, sustained fever — a state in which bodies lose their boundaries, identities dissolve, and something unnameable begins to take shape in the heat. Gallo makes work that feels old in the best sense: weighted with necessity, stripped of ornament, driven by a quality of attention that belongs less to contemporary art discourse than to the long human history of making images to survive by.

The exhibition moves through the gallery as a kind of procession. Figures appear and transform across two floors — from early charcoal drawings where bodies are still legible, through works where water and coffee have been absorbed into the paper's grain, submitting form to something more elemental, to aluminum sculptures that give physical mass to what had previously only been mark and shadow. The progression is not linear but cumulative, as Gallo's process itself tends to be: each material discovery folds into the next, each accidental encounter becomes method. What arrives on the walls is the residue of an investigation that never fully resolves.

Gallo's imagery occupies a threshold that is anatomical without being clinical, spiritual without being illustrative. Her figures are neither quite human nor quite otherwise — they press against one another, entangle, orbit a shared center of gravity before flying apart. Fusion, in her hands, is not a peaceful state but a volatile one: the moment before rupture, when two things have become so close that distinction collapses and something new, and disorienting, must emerge. The exhibition's title is less metaphor than diagnosis — a condition the work both describes and induces.

Primeira Febre opens May 12 and remains on view through June 13, 2026.