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Flat Works for Structured Bodies
Pilar Gallego

June 06, 2025 – July 13, 2025

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(Philadelphia, PA) Fuller Rosen Gallery is excited to present Flat Works for Structured Bodies, a solo exhibition by Pilar Gallego. In Flat Works for Structured Bodies, Gallego presents a suite of fabric pieces and sewing patterns that redefine masculinity by deconstructing and queering the restrained architecture of menswear. At once sculptural and diagrammatic, these textile constructions serve as portraits of failed containment and disciplined bodies undone.

Join us for an opening reception of Flat Works for Structured Bodies at Fuller Rosen Gallery on First Friday, June 06 from 6-9 pm.

Pilar Gallego, Study in Structural Collapse 4, 2025, found men’s shirts, thread, polyfill

Gallego’s cross-disciplinary art practice investigates issues relating to in/visibility, homonormativity, displacement, desire, assimilation, and respectability politics. Looking to the closet and wardrobe as a repository for potential selves, Gallego considers the ways in which design marks and speaks for the body. The idiom “clothes make the man” is interrogated and examined with artistic nuance. Without clothing, a person is stripped of social identity and influence. It is not just that clothes enhance a person, they define them. Without them, one becomes invisible, insignificant, devoid of presence or authority. Clothing does not simply complement power—it is its very expression. Suits, button-up shirts, uniforms, corporate skins—the aesthetic and ideological framework of white-collar masculinity.

Pilar Gallego, Flat Pattern: 1″ Constructible Box, #904, 2025, scaled draft for assembly, ink on paper

Through the logic of pattern-making and the visual language of tailoring, Gallego manipulates seams, folds, and fabric into forms that oscillate between repression and rupture. The works reference not only bodily containment—fatness, excess, deviance—but also the aesthetic codes of domination: symmetry, geometry, the grid. In resisting their own neatness, the pieces become queer—monstrous, chaotic, and ungovernable. They are feminine fat restrained; what excess looks like when it fails to contain itself. Gallego’s work points to where cultural codes and gender myths intersect and collide. They look into the body and its construction to unearth potential and possibilities. Tumors, growths, mutations, and unwanted bodies are now desirable and beautiful. The garments Gallego constructs are flayed, tucked, glitched. Their undoing is the beginning of a new masculinity; one that happily evolves into a spectral abundance of plurality.

Pilar Gallego, Study in Structural Collapse 2, 2025, found men’s shirts, thread

Flat Works for Structured Bodies is unapologetic and unwilling to hide behind centuries of toxicity and failed performances. Businessmen, salarymen, lawyers, finance bros, suburban fathers—men of structure, control, and secrecy all undone and recast into extraordinary forms. While Gallego provides patterns and templates for how to construct this new queered wardrobe, the process of replication highlights the complexity and absurdity of gender performance altogether. Flat Works for Structured Bodies offers the human body what it actually needs to thrive; humor, patience, and kindness.

Pilar Gallego (b. 1981, Colombia, they/them) is an immigrant, queer and trans artist of color. They received their BFA from the Pratt Institute and is a graduate of the MFA Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Working conceptually with an interest in fashion theory and the production of subjectivity, they employ a wide variety of processes such as mold-making, welding, sewing, and woodworking, crossing a range of genres including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Gallego has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and Yaddo.

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Cassie Renée Peña

Ryan Patrick Krueger

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