Diego Kohli: Dance for mountains

A Gentil Carioca is pleased to present Dança para montanhas, by Diego Kohli, marking his first exhibition in Brazil. Through drawings and paintings, hands and feet dance across landscapes where body and world merge, moving between dream and everyday life. Following his first artist residency in Brazil, at Casa VOA, Kohli incorporates Rio de Janeiro’s landscape into a universe of incomplete bodies in constant transformation. Through drawing and painting, the artist explores the relationships between figure and ground, expression and representation, creating scenes in which the familiar becomes strange and the landscape reveals itself as an integral part of the experience of being in the world.

Diego Kohli (b. 1991) lives and works between Basel, Switzerland, and Madrid, Spain. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the École de design et Haute école d’art du Valais in Switzerland, as well as master’s degrees in Artistic Production from the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain and in Fine Arts from the Institute Art Gender and Nature (IAGN) in Basel, Switzerland. He also studied Fine Arts at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, Belgium.

Kohli is interested in the technical aspects and traditions of painting and frequently experiments with new techniques. By transforming sketches into paintings, he arranges fragmented bodies and forms into almost theatrical stage sets, treating them as still lifes. His practice draws from art history, psychoanalysis, dream theory and his immediate surroundings. His surrealist imagery is built out of tragicomic situations charged with humor and irony.

By decontextualizing recognizable elements, he investigates the boundaries between what is and what may cease to be familiar. Nature, interiors, furniture, food, faces, hands and feet become symbolic extensions of the psyche or archetypal signs of strength and movement. The fragmented body parts he paints possess an almost sculptural quality and, once framed, become protagonists of theatrical settings conceived as contemporary subversions of the classical still life.

In 2026, the artist participated in the group exhibitions “Beyond Visible Reality” at Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich, Switzerland; “Casa Compartida” at Fundación Caja Castellón in Castellón, Spain; “Secret Wonder” at Set Espai d’Art in Valencia, Spain; “Devenir(s)” at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, Spain; and “Actual Notes” at Galerie Rolando Anselmi in Rome, Italy.

In 2025, the artist took part in the group exhibitions “Cantonale 25” at Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf; “Cantonale 25” at Kunsthaus Centre d’Art Pasquart in Biel/Bienne; and “My Protagonists” at Kunstraum Riehen in Riehen, Switzerland. In 2024, he participated in “Regionale 25. Expanded Drawings” at Kunstraum Riehen in Riehen, Switzerland, and “Le Décathlon de Apollon” at Château de Montsoreau – Musée d’art contemporain in Montsoreau, France.

His works are held in prominent collections, including the Art Collection of the Canton of Bern (Switzerland), the Miettinen Collection (Germany), the Collection of Mimi Dusselier and Bernard Soens (Belgium), the Colección Cirat (Spain), and the Fondazione CRC (Italy).