Barcelona, 1952

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Frederic Amat’s artistic career dates all the way back to the early 1970’s. Just after completing his studies in architecture and set design, he went to live in Mexico and later he moved to New York, where he explored hand-made paper as an artistic material. His travels to Brazil, Egypt, Haiti, Morocco and so on has fecundated an oeuvre characterized by constant research. Throughout Amat’s career, he has been diversifying his plastic repertoire, his development going from irregular lines and vibrant colors in his early drawings to the expressionism in his later works.

 

The work of Amat defies a single way of categorization. His open conception of painting led him to integrate a multitude of languages into his artistic practice, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation art, performance, book illustration, videos, theatre set design and interventions in architectural spaces.

Barcelona, 1946

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

 

Sergi Aguilar’s sculptures question and challenge the conventions of the principal paradigms that have shaped the history of the media in the context of Spain. In the nineties his work included photography and drawing, which had a heavy influence on the language of his sculptural works. Aguilar’s artistic oeuvre is shaped by his experiments with iron, and his attempts to create volume by “drawing in space”, by using iron sheets to form void spaces. Aguilar’s sculptures are as much the material as the empty negative spaces they shape. In his own words; “regardless of whether a space is virtual or not, what matters is the energy the work gives off and hence the territory it generates”.

 

Aguilar’s works speak in a pure and geometric abstract language. They interpret symmetry as a spatial measure and question the territories appropriation via sculpture. In this way the works insist on being a reflection on sculpture itself in relation to the surroundings, the transforming play of light and shade, and thereby a lyrical expression as much as a figurative.

Barcelona, 1919-1998

 

Joan Brossa, poet, playwright and artist, was one of the founders of the magazine “Dau Al Set”, together with Ponç, Cuixart, Arnau Puig, Tàpies and Tharrats, and author of an interdisciplinary work, characterized by experimentation with language and use of all kinds of techniques and styles. In 1960 he participated, invited by Joan Miró, in the exhibition Poètes, peintres, sculpteurs in the Galerie Maeght in Paris, at the same time that he began to collaborate with Miró and Tàpies and, later, with artists such as Alfons Borrell, Chillida, José Niebla, Perejaume, among others. In the international scene, he participated in important exhibitions such as the São Paulo (1994) and Venice (1997) biennials. Among the individual exhibitions stand out those made in the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret and the Musée de Collioure (1990); at the Center International de Poésie de Marseille; in the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid (1991); in the Kunstmuseum Malmö, Sweden (1993); at the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Palma de Mallorca (1994); at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey and at the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art in Mexico; in the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel and in the Städtische Galerie in Göppingen, Germany (1998), among others. After his death, in 2001 the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona dedicated him an important anthological exhibition and in 2017 MACBA presents the Poesia Brossa exhibition, a review of the artist’s work through books, visual searches, theater, cinema, music, action arts, etc.

Morro d’Alba (Italy), 1949

Lives and works in Rome 

 

 

 

Enzo Cucchi first emerged on the Italian art scene in the 1970s as a leading figure and pioneer in the trans avant-garde movement, known for its break with minimalism, reviving vivid color use, figuration and symbolism. Aiming to restore myth, mystery and magic in contemporary art, Cucchi’s paintings and drawings revolve around eyes, flames, faces and lightbulbs in dreamlike surrealistic landscapes. The trans avant-garde movement became well known in art circles and is appreciated for its bold decision to return to the roots of what makes mysterious, mystical art so appealing.

 

Growing up in Ancona where he used to spend his time observing a painting -and book restorer, Cucchi began to paint and write himself, eventually becoming a self-taught artist as well as a writer. In 1977, he realized his first exhibitions in Rome and Milan. He often exhibits his work along with poetic verses he himself has composed. In his works the violent gestures, coloring, textured surfaces and instinctual charcoal lines lend his tableaux immediacy and drama. His confronting works draw the spectator into a fantastic, dreamy and at times disquieting microcosm with references to surrealism and neo-expressionism.  

México City 1934 – 2017

 

 

Although José Luis Cuevas works in several mediums such as sculpture, engraving and painting, his aesthetics are heavily influenced by his inclination for drawing and the techniques of paper itself. He mainly works with ink, gouache, watercolors and pencil.

 

Cuevas is best known for his rendering of characters that finds themselves in the outskirts of society. The marginal nature of his figurative and realistic protagonists, such as prostitutes or crazy people, illustrates figures that have lost their place in the society – a world of misconducts where things are disrupted from the natural order. The style and influences of his work are often fixed to the darker side of life, depicting the debasement of humanity. This social position of his characters is not surprising, as Cuevas was one of the main figures of the generation of the rupture and rejection of the Mexican muralist movement, challenging the established national art scene.

 

The neofigurativism of Cuevas works invites the viewer into an inner landscape of the protagonist, offering us unique narratives of the monstrous and marginal, where spaces and environments are reduced in favor of a figuration of graphic, lifelike inner character.   

Bucharest, Romania, 1955

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Lydia Dona’s paintings hold many references to the city and the urban environment. So through tubes, screws and other objects that she superimposes to the colour stain, an enormous mechanism without human presence is revealed.

 

The surface of her paintings may recall the American abstract legacy of Pollock or Clyfford – Though the colours drift apart by their luminosity- that is juxtaposed to the mechanic images of the vanguards.

 

Lydia Dona maintains in her work the permanent conflict between urban abstractions with its noisy rhythm and the micro cosmos that makes it possible.

Barcelona, 1927-2007

 

Guinovart began his career as a painter in the 1940s, after having studied arts in Barcelona. He traveled to Paris, with a scholarship from the French Institute, at the beginning of the fifties, and, when he came back, his work, which had been marked by the figuration of Nonell or Gimeno, evolved into the abstract collage, linking to informalism.

 

At the end of the sixties, Guinovart’s work is politicized, incorporating allusions that allow the viewer to understand its meaning. His characteristic style has been defined as critical brutality, by the appearance of materials and elements of construction or of the field.

 

The work of Guinovart expands, through collage, towards sculpture. Throughout the seventies, his works take larger measures and win the third dimension with the incorporation of a large number of materials. Guinovart’s production is very diverse, from ceramics, graphic works, tapestries, posters, murals, to books and stage sets.

García Sevilla

Mallorca, 1949

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

The beginning of his artistic career is located in the context of the most provocative and non-conformist Catalan conceptual art scene. From 1978 he develops painting work of primitive and abstract character where Miró’s influence can be appreciated, in his automatism and the use of floating signs and/or objects on flat surfaces.

 

The evolution of his work has taken him to incorporate diverse elements and languages from diverse cultures, acting as a collector of images, often extracted from his travels around the Middle East.

 

In the last works of Garcia Sevilla, a major synthesis and a major economy of his pictorial language is made clear, being translated in the recurring use of a reduced number of signs that occupy and create the space in the paintings.

Andoain (Spain), 1963

Lives and works in Bilbao

 

 

 

 

Pello Irazu has been said to have renewed the contemporary sculpture in Spain and the Basque country since the beginning of his career in the 1980s. His work is a blend of constructivism, minimalism and conceptualism, mainly expressed in his sculptural works, though he also works in photography, drawing, lithography and installation art – at times combining the medias. His sculptural pieces are of a very open character, integrating different materials and utilizing various expressions.

 

In his more recent work he blends the two-dimensional with the three-dimensional in his combinations of sculpture, installation and photography, in the effort to blur the boundaries that traditionally separate artistic genres. In this way Irazu’s art explores the problems that arise in the multiple relations between our bodies, objects, images and spaces, as a form of performative act. It is Irazu’s main interest to explore the complex relationship between the viewers body, the artwork and the space they both occupy. The artwork becomes a starting point to go deeper into the relationship between humankind and space. In the case of Irazu’s work, space is not only the domain for thoughtful work loaded with lyricism, but also the very definition of the artists approach itself.

 

Pello Irazu studied fine arts at the University of País Vasco in Leonia, from 1981 to 1986, where he specialized in the study of sculpture. In 1982 he was awarded an art grant by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the following year he won a Basque sculpture prize. He won the ICARO Prize for most outstanding young Spanish artist in 1988, and a Fulbright Award in 1990.

Isla de la Juventud, Cuba 1970

Lives and works in Havana, Cuba

 

 

 

 

 

Kcho, born Alexis Leiva Machado, is a contemporary artist working in sculpture, installation art and mixed-media. He grew up in a small island in Cuba, surrounded by the ocean and its driftwoods, fishing nets, rope and ship propellers scattered across beaches.

 

Throughout his oeuvre Kcho have been utilizing these items as figures in his artistic imagery, depicting boats and boat-like forms using recycled materials, like bottles and lumber salvaged from docks. The notion that nothing is permanent, and everything transforms in the present, is ubiquitous throughout his work. This key component in his art is a clear reference to a culture of recycling very dear to Kho’s origins, in his own words; “I use waste materials because in the Cuban daily life there is a lot of recycling, we cannot afford to throw anything, we have been educated like this. My installations and sculptures have a life before that of my work because everything is recycled, life goes on”.

 

Kcho’s work can be read as ensembles of icons that reach monumental statures through the repetition of simple forms and ordinary materials – a veritable lexicon of island life, close to the ocean. The result is a poetic tale of the Cuban landscape and culture that forges a reflection on travel and environment, on the continual evolution of time and matter.

Chema Madoz

Madrid, 1958
Lives and works in Madrid

 

Chema Madoz’s work, close to visual poetry, shows a constant inclination towards symbolism, using images that are characterized by a subtle play of paradoxes and metaphors.

 

With regards to the ‘Still Life’ conventions, his photographs show objects that contain “life” and discover a new dimension of meaning through contextualization, relocation or juxtaposition of common and everyday appearances. In this manner, Chema Madoz shapes an imaginary that challenges our credulity in the picture, and in the existence of an intangible reality.

Palma Mallorca, 1962

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Macias has his roots in the so-called post-pop movement in Spain, depicting vividly colorful, abstract geometry. His early work can be read as a reformulation or assimilation of existing language from the culture of mass media. His works absorbs the formal pieces of an identifiable visual system, to bring its essential typologies together in a generic expression. They can be read as a semi-abstract reduction of the forms of everyday life. Several of Macias’ works apply the technique of interlocking figure and background, leading to the creation of double images, often not visible at first.

 

In recent years, Macias has been portraying imaginative characters in renderings that are still very colorful, but on the contrary carry grotesque and haunting features. They seem like they are dissolving, falling apart, but at the same time they convey their revulsion with an almost humoristic outrageousness; simple and iconographic, but also comic and personal.

 

Macias is interested in the artists role in fixing the forms of contemporary culture in the works; drawing attention to the painting, in his 2D- like figuration in his early days and pointing the mirror back towards the public in his confronting portraits.

Mir

Lubin, Poland, 1967

Citizen of Sweden and USA

Lives and works in London

 

 

Aleksandra Mir´s work is articulated around projects in which existing frictions between spheres of the private and the public, the local and the global and the intimate and the collective are demonstrated.

 

Her formation in Cultural Anthropology and in Audiovisual Communication has taken her to explore the strategies that are commonly used in the communication media. Such strategies are used in the exercise of power as much as in the inter-subjective relationships, two fields that configure the territory of the artistic practice exercised by Mir.

 

In spite of the especially speculative character of the themes she treats, the resulting works possesses a subversive element, almost playful, that approaches the spectator in an effective way. Likewise, many of her pieces require collaboration and direct implication of different collectives in the elaboration of the works.

Mislata (Valencia), 1945

Lives and works in Mislata

 

 

The work by Valencian sculptor Miquel Navarro is characterized by its persistent exploration of the urban landscape. Initially trained as a painter, Navarro produced two-dimensional images featuring geometric, structural and architectural forms—segments of landscapes or imaginary cities. In the seventies Navarro shifted his focus to sculpture and began working on his so-called Cities; sculptural installations set directly on the floor, containing many separate geometric components of varying shapes and materials; terracotta, iron, zinc and aluminum shaping fictional urban industrial landscapes.

 

Navarro’s work is about time and place, originating in his native environment, in the Valencian suburb Mislata, where he continues to live. His sculptures reflect the artists personal experience of the changeability of the man-made landscape; My work, based on my experience, ranges from rural to urban, from nature to industry. This can be explained by the characteristics of the town where I was born. In the fifties this town had large stretches of fertile land (completely taken over now by Valencia), and a fair amount of industry, which has expanded over the years”.

 

In Navarro’s sculptural worlds we are confronted with our own body, in his works with scale and miniaturization. The beholder is invited to physically circumnavigate his works in real space but also to simultaneously, mentally project oneself into the space on an imagined scale. In Navarro’s words; “when you define a city, you define a body”. Navarro invites us to navigate these urban installations and to think about the notion of human scale and the difference between the real and the cerebral. Hereby his works represent a philosophical view on reality, in which one must go beyond logic to experience what is large in what is small.

 

Navarro’s works carry a certain abstraction in which he uses geometric figures to transform art into a system. He channels his work toward a system of infinite units, sometimes hundreds of small pieces, prisms, pyramids, cylinders, cones placed next to each other. The expression becomes almost timeless and the viewer is challenged to look beneath and beyond the apparent in the suggestive architectonic metaphorical urban spaces presented in the work.

New York, 1957

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Tony Oursler has not only created his own genre within the arts during the 70ties, but also his own universe within his mediation. Although Tony Oursler is a major figure in recent history of art of multi-media installation and video projections, his humoristic and cunning imaging also finds expression in his works on paper and in his paintings.

 

The mini-narratives of Ourslers artworks often takes place within a microcosmic scenery where the viewers sense of security and uneasiness is tested by the limits between representative, realistic and imaginary landscapes. In Ourslers own words: “My characters tend to exist in a kind of existential spaces, somewhat tortured, struggling”.

 

From the outset, Tony Oursler has explored the relationship between man and cultural production, applying humor and irony to his work. Hereby he elevates everyday things above their mere objectivity, commenting on contemporary culture in themes such as violence, sex, religion, media, family, etc. always questioning the status of human beings in a destabilized world.

Madrid, 1915 – Galapagar, Madrid, 2007

 

Throughout his career, Pablo Palazuelo developed a very personal form of geometric abstraction linked to esoteric issues, Kabbalah, Eastern philosophy, along with mathematics, physics and scientific thinking.

 

Palazuelo, initially, studied architecture before deciding to devote himself only to painting in 1939. Later, he also ventured into the third dimension, producing sculpture from 1954.

 

In the 1940s, his work was influenced by the abstraction of Paul Klee, but in the early 1950s he began to draw inspiration from his readings of Theosophy and hermetic texts dealing with the connections between numbers, the sacred or the psychic, and the correspondence between sound and color, focusing on the language of geometric forms. For Palazuelo, geometry is at the origin of life and allows a view of hidden structures, potential new forms and the metamorphosis of one form in another.

Pimstein

Mexico City, 1962

Lives in Barcelona

 

 

This painter’s work starts from the reflection and investigation over what he observes in his environment and the dialogue with himself. This leads to a complete pictorial series strongly personal, around a subject that he wants to understand, explore, approach or even appropriate to find its meaning, as for example the one he dedicated to the Dutch master Vermeer of Delft or to the films by John Ford.

 

This repainting of Pimstein is a recreation or an invention; it’s not about a mere copy. The artist approaches his object of study with a contemporary sensitivity.

 

He often concentrates his attention on details: the fragment or series on a same fragment; he also amplifies particular aspects. He even focuses on the detail or the amplification making it become something abstract or decontextualized. His fractured painting’s sense understands the object of study not as contemplation but as a relationship between the painter and that object, in that his self is enriched and modified in a context that goes further than the limits of direct experience.

 

The images in his work are intentionally blurred as if it was about a stimulus to imagination or put in another way, to place the mystery in our own subjectivity as a dialogue instrument with painting.

  Barcelona, 1927 – Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1984

 

Joan Ponç was a primordial painter within the avant-garde scene during the Spanish post-war period. Founder of the magazine “Dau Al Set”, together with Brossa, Cuixart, Arnau Puig, Tàpies and Tharrats, he would remain faithful to the aesthetic principles of the group throughout his long career. After a brief stay in Paris, he lived in Brazil, where he created the group L’Esplai and where he exhibited at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (1954 and 1956). In 1964 he returned to Catalonia, the same year that René Metras Gallery in Barcelona organized a retrospective exhibition. In 1972 the monograph Universo y magia de Joan Ponç de Mordechai Omer was published and in 1978 the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris dedicated him an important solo exhibition. His work has been exhibited in important museums and art centers such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz; Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico; The National Museum of Art of Romania Bucharest; Fondation Maeght de Saint-Paul-de-Vence, among others. In 2017, Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera in Barcelona presents the exhibition Diàbolo, a new anthological interpretation of the work and the figure of the painter, from the forties to the eighties.

Barcelona 1954

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

 

 

Josep Riera i Aragó can be described as a visual poet, a sculptor who is equally at ease in the painting studio or in the printmakers workshop. Very early in his artistic development he established a deceivingly simple iconography to surprisingly universal and inescapable results. During the 1980s Riera i Aragó discovers his interest in the deep-sea environment, submarines, airplanes and machines operated by engines. This trace of the machine has since then been a clear thread through his oeuvre. Never repetitive, each “machine” he creates, regardless of the medium, evokes without pathos or condescension, a clear and sympathetic view of humanity. They machines are not only blurring the traditional frontiers between sculpture and painting, finally overlapping the two artforms, it also blurs the space between functional machines with a direct purpose and the life of the objects as art pieces. Riera i Aragó’s work highlights the machines, seen in its own dysfunction, in what is has been created for but never manage to do. His zeppelins, airplanes, ships and submarines must assume their inability to sail or fly. 

 

Besides from Riera i Aragó’s sculptures made in bronze and at times recovered iron, his oeuvre also holds great paintings and works on paper utilizing the same iconography as the sculptures; propellers, engines and machines. Especially his later painting seems to almost mimic or portray his sculptures, creating a close narrative between the two. Riera i Aragó’s pieces are essential to the understanding of some of the most characteristic emblems of our time, the world of machines and artifacts in general. His works speaks paradoxically about the machine, its transience, its capacity for suggestion, on a journey back and forth from real to imaginary space.

Brownsville (USA), 1959

Lives and works in New York, USA, and Cuernavaca, Mexico.

 

Ray Smith’s work emerged in the 80s and, from a collaborative and inclusive approach, is characterized by exuberant paintings and sculptures that blend magical realism, surrealism and avant-garde art.

 

His style and themes reflect a cultural heritage from the United States and Mexico. At first, he trained in fresco painting with traditional Mexican professionals, also receiving influences from Picasso, surrealists and Mexican political muralism.

 

Recurrently, we find in Ray Smith’s canvases contorted human figures, as well as images of dogs and other anthropomorphized animals, along with fantastic hybrid beasts, partly human, partly animal. Through these varied beings and other images of distorted objects, Ray Smith shows the complexity and absurdity of society, family, politics, culture, war and the human condition itself.

Erick Beltrán

Mexico City, 1974

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Erick Beltrán analyzes and reflects on the edition concept and the discourse constructions. He investigates the power that the different graphic means exert in their distribution of information, as well as explicit treatment on different conducts and values.

 

He works with diverse formats as the multiple or the book; he experiments and investigates the link between public art and the diverse graphic languages.

 

The archive, the museum and the library are tools and natural means in their investigation process. A process in which the edition concept focuses all the work, understanding it as the mechanism with which communication through images that create political, economical and cultural discourses in contemporary societies are defined, evaluated, classified and reproduced.

Cabello/Carceller

Borrador para una exposición sin título.

Curator: Manuel Segade

CA2M, Madrid

19.01.2017 – 02.05.2017

 

Since 1992, Cabello/Carceller (Paris, 1963 / Madrid, 1964) have constructed a joint artistic project focused on a critique of hegemonic visual culture. Over this time, they have made use of tools of feminist, queer and decolonial theory and of visual and cultural studies to produce a body of work that questions the neoliberal model of social production. By means of interdisciplinary practices they afford alternatives to conventional narratives on political minorities, including the debate on the role of contemporary art production. Based on mutual collaboration and on the incorporation of external actors and agents, their working method has enabled them to enact displacements and disruptions that uncover resistances to and divergences with conventional values.

 

Following their participation in the Spanish Pavilion at the latest Venice Biennale, this exhibition is the first survey show of their practice, contextualising their latest projects within a framework bookended on one side by the Cultural Wars of the late eighties—their formative period—and on the other by the social revolutions against the return to neoliberal order in recent years.

 

http://www.ca2m.org/en/cabello-carceller

ERICK BELTRÁN

The Museum of Rhythm

Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz

25.11.2016 – 05.03.2017

The Museum of Rhythm is a speculative institution that engages rhythm as a tool for interrogating the foundations of modernity and the sensual complex of time in daily experience. When entering a larger cultural infrastructure such as the art museum, it juxtaposes modern and contemporary art with ethnographic research, cinema, music, and scientific instruments to set in resonance a critical apparatus and conduct exercises in Rhythmanalysis.

+ info

 

FERNANDO BRYCE

Verboamérica

MALBA, Buenos Aires

 

Verboamérica is performative and temporal; it evidences the crisis of a single and linear notion of historical time that globalization has witnessed,” explains Pérez Rubio in the exhibition catalogue; a cornerstone of the publication is Joaquín Torres-García’s famous map América invertida [Inverted America], a work that, as early as 1936, posited a modification in the geographic and spatial, but also temporal, pre-eminence of the Americas.

 

http://www.malba.org.ar/en/evento/verboamerica/