Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Head Stretch, a group exhibition including Felipe Barsuglia, Allan Gandhi, Luciana Maas, Flora Rebollo, Gokula Stoffel, and Erika Verzutti.
Head Stretch brings together a group of artists whose work is united not in thematics, but by place – a shared studio building in São Paulo affectionately nicknamed “Predinho,” or little building. In her own words, Erika Verzutti slowly infiltrated the building, becoming “some kind of mentor, a groupie, an older friend, a dame that asks for tea and specific biscuits, an annoying friend who likes so many things.” As a result, existing friendships led to new connections, studio visits, board games, and late-night conversations, an analog version of the “infinite scroll”, leading to an exhibition shaped by the kaleidoscopic dialogues that develop in parallel to artistic practice. This applies to the title itself, which took on individual meanings with each of the artists included. For Flora Rebollo, it immediately recalled the familiar gesture of craning one's head around to see the work of another. With Gokula Stoffel, it evoked the attenuated proportions of one single tall figure within a narrow canvas. And for Verzutti, the title reminded her of speaking with Felipe Barsuglia about his divergent works, and feeling the need to reign in her own thoughts in order to find more space to listen.
Within this sense of community, a small idea, or locale, can become an expansive one, which is mimicked in the works’ installation. Allan Ghandi’s characters speak across rooms, paintings crawl up the gallery’s walls, and crowd themselves into corners, creating new associations as disparate visual languages and materials abut one another. Seen collectively, they demonstrate that an artwork exists beyond its own frame, as each viewer brings with them their own experiences. Luciana Maas’ many Pinocchios became inseparable from Verzutti’s memories of her own childhood, watching a Japanese cartoon devoted to the same character, and the flood of exaggerated emotions that accompanied it. Throughout the exhibition, Verzutti has inserted her own sculptures and drawings, allowing the work of others to open them to new readings, and to serve as a reminder that sometimes the best thing you can do for your head, is to get outside of it.
Felipe Barsuglia (b. 1989, Rio de Janeiro) works across painting, video, and installation. Transforming recognizable fragments of everyday life with absurdist gestures, his works become cultural microcosms that explore the tension between euphoria and exhaustion, laughter and tears, and blend the sublime and the grotesque, the erudite and the popular. Barsuglia’s work is currently the subject of an exhibition at galeria Sardenberg, São Paulo, on view through April 30th. Past solo exhibitions include Plin Plin, galeria Sardenberg, São Paulo, 2024, and Cansado, Central Galeria, São Paulo, 2023.
Allan Gandhi (b. 1989, São Paulo) is a painter and visual artist who lives and works in São Paulo. Gandhi’s characters inhabit unconventional personas, and speak a complicated language activated by a variety of facial expressions, and gestures moving between an eccentric wildness, and a considered cool. Employing a vibrant palette of diverse hues and tones, he develops a dramatic painterly language that extends through his characters’ facial expressions. His works have primarily been exhibited in Brazil to date, including a recent solo exhibition at galeria Sardenberg, São Paulo in 2025. Later this year, he will have his first solo exhibition in Europe at Mendes Wood, Brussels.
Over the course of two decades, Luciana Maas (b. 1984, São Paulo) has developed a body of work that aims to capture the metamorphosis of the pictorial plane through the act of painting. Fragmentary in appearance, Maas embraces a state of unfinishedness that suggests an image in transformation. Combining references to the real world to those that are imagined, Maas’ paintings ask the viewer to remain suspended in a tension between seeing and knowing. In 2024, Fundação Iberê, Porto Alegre, presented her first institutional exhibition titled Balanço. Other recent solo exhibitions include galeria Sardenberg, São Paulo, 2025.
Drawing is at the core of Flora Rebollo’s (b. 1983, São Paulo) practice, capturing an often associative flow of ideas onto a two dimensional surface. Rebollo often begins her works with small gestures, made at the scale of the hand, before expanding to that of the body, and occasionally, that of the space around it, incorporating different surfaces, and objects in the process. In turn, her works become a record of the body’s presence, in both feeling and movement, as well as a tool as integral to the work as material itself. Recent solo exhibitions of Rebollo’s work include Ansiedade Cósmica Projeto Vênus Gallery, São Paulo, 2024, and O primeiro dia de Dadá, Quadra Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, 2022.
Gokula Stoffel (b. 1988, Porto Allegre) embraces the accidental as a co-creator of her paintings and sculptures. Whether unraveling a patch of paint to depict an arm or turning a human figure into the image of a landscape, Stoffel is interested in the distortions and upheavals of form and scenery. Upholstery, weaves, resins, natural and synthetic fibers, share space in compositions that articulate a free execution with palpable emotional intensity, reflecting a sinuous practice that is not tied to technique, but instead shares an underlying order guided by the artist’s hand, and the inherent qualities of material. Recent solo exhibitions of Stoffel’s work include Um lugar para a cabeça, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, 2025, Thinking Hands, François Ghebaly, New York, 2024, and The Moon Between My Teeth, Elizabeth Xi Bauer, London, 2023, among others.
Erika Verzutti (b. 1971, São Paulo) lives and works between Paris and São Paulo. Tactile in its approach, Erika Verzutti’s practice rests between sculpture and painting, drawing on a wide range of references from nature to popular culture. Shapes derived from fruits or vegetables recur alongside familiar objects, self-referential gestures, and images culled from social media to form a new vernacular. Firmly rooted in studio practice, Verzutti’s work revels in its process and explores how disparate ideas and perceptions take on a physical form. Verzutti’s work Naked Venus is included in Sculpture in the Park, on view through May 2, 2027 at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK. Previous solo exhibitions include The Life of Sculptures, LUMA Arles, France, 2024, Notizia, ICA Milano, Milan, 2024, New Moons, CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on Hudson, NY, 2023, Tantra, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, 2023, indisciplina da escultura, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, 2021, and Erika Verzutti, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019, among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; MAM - Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Tate Modern, London, UK and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, among others.