The Daville Baillie Gallery
Presents
XANA ABREU
Live in Johannesburg
3 November – 23 November 2019
The Daville Baillie Gallery at Victoria Yards takes great pleasure in welcoming multitalented Portuguese artist Xana Abreu to our gallery. Although the widely renowned artist has been exhibiting selected works on our group shows for the past year, she finally asserts her local presence with her first solo exhibition in Johannesburg.
In her large, magical portraits Abreu paints stories of a parallel world, filled with real and imaginary beings, animalized humans and humanized animals, in the skin of other people. Essentially, these are women who become the reflection of the artist and her vision about life. In these stories we find real experiences of childhood, or those more recent, and dreams.
This is the world that Xana Abreu wants to share with us. It is a carnival of perception in which the artist displays her innermost desires and fears on the surface of her visage. We don’t need to go any deeper because she has shown us everything we need to know.
Brief Biography of Xana Abreu
Abreu was born in 1975, in Lisbon, Portugal. She attended the António Arroio Art School and later the Lisbon College of Arts specializing in painting.
Abreu is a public figure in Portugal, being an extremely successful singer for children, having sold over 250 000 DVDs, and having gained over 200 000 000 views on her YouTube channel. She also composes songs for several notable Portuguese singers. The first DVD she recorded went straight to nº 1 on the Portuguese charts and stayed there for 41 weeks, with sold out concerts everywhere she went.
She is also an actress, working for movies, TV shows, theatre, and animation movies. She has illustrated more than 100 schoolbooks for Portugal, Angola, Mozambique and Brazil. However, her main goal and passion is painting. That´s what she studied, and that’s how she sees herself.