Category Archives: Artists representation

Pablo del Pozo

Badajoz, 1994

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

The works by Pablo del Pozo have a strong autobiographical character, linked to the experiences of the artist. The feeling of belonging to a place, displacement and nostalgia are subjects that concern him. From the characteristics of the materials used (clay, plaster, pigments and also found objects), he seeks to talk about the precariousness of life, thus generating a reflection on the daily reality.

Cabrita

Lisbon, 1956

Lives and works in Lisbon

 

Cabrita’s complex work can be characterized by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of means: painting, photography, drawing, and sculptures composed of industrial materials and found objects.

 

His work has steadily received international acknowledgement, thus becoming crucial and decisive for the understanding of sculpture from the mid-1980’s onwards. By using simple materials that are submitted to constructive processes, Cabrita recycles almost anonymous reminiscences of primordial gestures and actions repeated in everyday life. Centered in questions relative to space and memory, his works gain a suggestive power of association which reach a metaphorical dimension by going beyond the visual.

 

The complex theoretical and formal diversity of the work of Cabrita proceeds from an anthropological reflection, which is contrary to the reductionism of sociological discourse. In fact, it is on silences and indagations that the work of Cabrita is based and built on.

Enrique Martínez Celaya

Palos, Cuba, 1964

Lives and works in Los Angeles

 

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya works with painting, developing it from the perspective of scientific thought, philosophical, poetic and intellectual.

 

His work brings a permanent concern about experience and representation to light. It is an answer to the surrounding world, especially to nature, the environment of being, and his own perception through ideas that appear over and over again: the child, the sea, the trees, the mountains, the animals, the birds.

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s works exposes the possibilities and limits of representation at the same time. His paintings are a poetic way to explore notions such as confidence, symbolism, displacement, fragmentation, integrity, time, memory and identity.

Lola Lasurt

Barcelona, 1983

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Lola Lasurt’s artistic activity focuses on painting and video and many times also on collaborative processes that confer a universal projection, to her works of a more personal character.

 

The project about the ‘des-time’ can be understood as the analysis and the questioning of a time period, previous to hers. This is one of the main axis of her work, that frequently uses as a starting point elements from the material and aesthetic culture, that reveal behavioral patterns and ideological parameters of a determined era.  

 

Her pieces revolve around the themes of the memory and the oblivion, the nostalgia and the amnesiac need. Lola Lasurt is interested in the historical individual time and its relationship with the guidelines of the hegemonic culture and the construction of collective symbols.

Alicia Kopf

Girona, 1982

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

From the exercise of drawing and writing, Alicia Kopf reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns.

 

The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature, studies that allow her to get closer to subjects as diverse as poor housing or the epic of polar exploration from a position that combines both awe and ironic distance.

 

Alicia Kopf’s work arises from a metaphor, which allows her to perform an analytic exercise that will finally lead to different associations. Thus, in her project Articantàrtic, from the appropriation and the reshaping of graphical and narrative documents, Alicia Kopf turns a historical account into a first person narrative concerning resistance, obsession and the idea of conquest.

Annika Kahrs

Achim, Germany, 1984

Lives and works in Berlin

 

 

Annika Kahrs is a Hamburg-based artist who primarily works with film, performance and photography.

 

In her work Annika Kahrs examines representation and interpretation; she is interested in both social and scientific constructs, as well as evolved organic relations such as those between humans and animals. Her films oscillate between obvious staging and documentary-like observation; a distinctive implication in Kahrs’ videos is that she never hides herself in the film, even if her presence is only unveiled in a short glance from an actor to the director, it reveals a singular approach to her environment almost guided by a mathematical process.

 

Kahrs’ videos are like composed choreographies. Music often plays a role in her films, not only presented pictorially or on the audio track, but converted into image; through her selection and the ensuing adjustments during the process of editing partitur turns to film, and, subsequently, this film as partitur can turn into another film in the viewer’s mind.

Hernández Pijuan

Barcelona, 1931-2005

 

 

Joan Hernández Pijuan started painting during the sixties with a style related to expressionism. Nevertheless, during the seventies the empty space started gaining prominence in his paintings such as the geometrical figures. As he mentioned himself, `the space´ became the objective of his work; `I’d say that a constant preoccupation is, and has been finding a space as total protagonist of the canvass. (…) A space as a living element and not as a surface upon which one draws or places himself.´

 

The landscape of his childhood in the town of Folquer have become a pictorial motive in his adult age: Hernández Pijuan resorts to a memory exercise to recreate it synthetically in his painting.

 

The objective of this painter was never to achieve a descriptive or narrative painting, but to emphasize through the monochrome the pictorial technique itself.

Luis Gordillo

Seville, 1934

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Luis Gordillo started his career during the fifties when he travelled to Paris and got acquainted with the European art of the time, in particular with artists such as Wols, Dubuffet, Michaux and Fautrier. In his first works the influence of surrealism and Tàpies can be appreciated to which an early seventies Pop art associated iconography would be incorporated in later years.

 

Gordillo becomes one of the permanently renovating painters of the pictorial language and one of the artists that during the early seventies reincorporate figuration. It’s likewise in that moment, when he starts to work with photographic images, that this, in some way or another, is introduced in the process of creation in his paintings.

 

Both ideas, that of the process and the continuous construction as resource of accumulation, are elements that are permanently present in his work.

Carles Congost

Olot, 1970

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Carles Congost’s work revolves around the construction of personality and the behaviour codes and it is noted by the redevelopment of cinematographic, photographic and musical stereotypes. His work is developed in a harmonic way along with different disciplines –photographs, videos, sound and drawing- incorporating at the same time a classical and ironical treatment to the image.

 

The art world constitutes one of the themes that Congost has incorporated to his recent work, from the theatrical stagings that question the mechanisms, to the dynamics and stereotypes of the art world itself.

Hannah Collins

London, 1956

Lives and works between London and Níjar (Almería, Spain)

 

 

Hannah Collins is one of the pioneer artists in the use of the large format in the photographic discipline. She became known in the international scene during the early nineties.

 

The size of her works is often monumental, however the portrayed theme is often seemingly close to the spectator, incorporating a reflection around the fleetingness of present time and its survival through the memory of places.

 

From 2000, Hannah Collins began to introduce film and video often projected over multiple screens incorporating constructed musical soundtracks. She has maintained a performative element in her work and has expanded her interest in those people and places who inhabit the limit or margins of society and in the future of the human species. Her still images are often located between documentation and precise acted performance. Migration and modern attempts to improve our vision of the future have been subjects in recent works including The Fertile Forest (2015) a work made in the Colombian Amazon, I will make up a Song (2018) and The Earth Beneath My Feet (2022).

Victoria Civera

Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955

Lives and works between New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Victoria Civera’s career began in the seventies, working mainly photomontage. Over the next decade she focused on painting, abstract at first, but then introduced figurativism. In the middle of this decade Victoria Civera moves to New York and integrates photography and sculpture to her practice. Her creations undergo a transformation, making them more introspective.

 

Because of the iconography of her work, focused on the feminine universe, and because of her oneiric content, Victoria Civera has achieved a personal language, full of nuances. She moves in between large-scale pieces, in which she uses industrial materials, and suggested and poetic understatement pieces, often incorporating ordinary household objects.

Cabello/Carceller

Helena Cabello (Paris, 1963) and Ana Carceller (Madrid, 1964)

Live and work in Madrid

 

 

Cabello/Carceller’s work is set in a territory from which they question, reflect and/or fracture the roles or stereotypes associated to gender. They understand identity as something built in conflict or in consonance with a social, cultural, political and economic environment. They point at an `I´ that is always found according to the `others´, this idea vertebrates their production.

 

In their works the patterns, which are linked in a static way to either masculine or feminine roles, are revised. In this way, images are subverted in their works along with behavioral codes and attitudes, associated to that which is commonly considered as masculine or feminine.

 

The rereading that Cabello/Carceller’s work forms in the mentioned models, position the spectator facing multiple prejudice, assumed values and contradictions that manage to effectively destabilize a univocal vision of reality.

Alfons Borrell

Barcelona, 1931 – Sabadell, 2020

 

 

Alfons Borrell is one of the most prominent representatives of lyrical abstraction in Catalonia.

 

After attending the studio of Anglada Camarasa and the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Alfons Borrell began his artistic career in the fifties, within figuration at first. His work evolved into abstract expressionism and, already in the sixties, to the gestural painting.

 

In the mid-seventies he developed the style of its own, detached of any label, characterized by a sober chromatism that  is consciously disassociated from the material informality. In his painting, the color is imposed on the form, from a language that waives any reference, craving and seeking restraint and rigor.

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.

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.

Antoni Muntadas

Barcelona, 1942

Lives and works between Barcelona, New York and Venice.

 

 

Antoni Muntadas’s work has developed from its beginning –early seventies– a constant criticism towards the languages and messages of the media as clear instruments of power.

 

Since the first moment he used the video as useful tool to dissect and make the mechanisms of communications visible, referring to television and the designated `media landscape´. This genuine study and treatment turned him into an early pioneer in the audiovisual artistic field.

 

Likewise, Muntadas has analyzed and questioned the relationships that are established between the public and the private through his video works, photographs and multimedia installations; it’s from the early nineties that he incorporates internet to this list.

 

Also, since the 90s, he initiates new kinds of long-term. In each of these projects a principal concept is developed, which extends through different stages and contexts.

Perejaume

Sant Pol de Mar, 1957

Lives and works in Sant Pol de Mar

 

 

Perejaume started to exhibit his work during the late seventies and since then he has been developing it in parallel, either in visual disciplines or in literary extension.

 

The landscape is a recurring subject analyzed and explored in his work, retaking and reevaluating the presence it has had most of all, in its literary and visual production. Through this approach, his relationship with the landscape is examined from diverse points of view none of which are exempt of irony. Points of view that are shaped through painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video or the intervention on the natural environment itself.

 

For Perejaume, man is part of the landscape, he isn’t an outsider to it and he is yet another agent in its conformation and evolution, as if the geologic time would have been accelerated.

Javier Peñafiel

Zaragoza, 1964

Lives and works in Mallorca

 

 

Javier Peñafiel’s work, drawings, videos, texts and sculptures make up a linguistic system parallel to a reality to which he is unconnected.

 

All through his career, Javier Peñafiel has built up a universe inhabited by characters; by sentences that work autonomously, such as phrases that have the duty to bother the quiet and routine based use of the language by the spectator; or videos where diverse elements are combined in the shape of tableaux, sharing a space but keeping at the same time their identity separate.

 

The works of Javier Peñafiel show the necessity and the difficulty in direct communication. His works investigate the double identity – as obstacle and as a bridge- that the language represents in such communication.

Fernando Prats

Santiago de Chile, 1967

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

In his work Fernando Prats “paints” or, we’d rather say, recreates nature; he deals with registering tracks, making the invisible visible, giving voice and image to what was present but kept unnoticed.

 

Using seismographs, traces, photographs, videos… he registers the beat of different realities on smoked supports, from the flight of birds to the wild jet of a geyser, the deep coal of mines or the powerful waves that break against the cliff. Thus, Fernando Prats holds an unorthodox relationship with painting, both for the choice of his instruments and for the intervention of chance.

 

His work is formalized in actions which himself registers, that show the creative processes intrinsic to his work. Fernando Prats paintings are time-objects, as they condense in their finished form a story, the one of its creation, whose times often have nothing to do with the ones of the artist, but with the natural rhythms.

Caio Reisewitz

São Paulo, 1967

Lives and works in São Paulo

 

 

The register of a high-speed changing nature is one of the subjects that articulates Caio Reisewitz’s photographic work and, in this sense, his images are placed in a tradition in which photographic means are witnesses and capture ephemeral realities. The activity of man on the planet, and in certain areas in particular, radically modifies the appearance of the landscape.

 

His photographs, which are mostly large format, are characterized by their frontality and by a spectacular clarity that shows an exuberant nature and an unreal utopian beauty. On one occasion he himself commented: ‘sometimes these images don’t seem real, utopian they are, but they are true, it is the pure reality’.

Ràfols Casamada

Barcelona, 1923-2009

 

 

Besides his long pictorial career which has boosted him internationally, Albert Ràfols Casamada has another creative side as a literary poet. It is of no surprise that his multidisciplinary character attracts him to teaching and pedagogy in the world of fine Art.

 

In his painting, modernity’s fragile equilibrium has been developed and maintained: his work, of classical origin, incorporates at the same time the legacy of the avant-gardes.

 

During the early seventies he abandoned figuration to work in the field of abstract painting that would take him, during the eighties and nineties, to develop a more lyrical abstraction. This process would lead to what is his most recognized stage in his artistic career.

 

On the other hand, Ràfols Casamada has had a fundamental role in the renewal of the arts teaching in Spain being the founding member of the Eina School in Barcelona in 1967.

Julião Sarmento

Lisbon, 1948- Estoril, 2021

 

 

From the early seventies, Julião Sarmento has explored the possibilities of painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. There is a process of suggestive hiding in his works that situates the spectator not only as an observer but also as a participant of his narrative.

 

The woman is a recurring motive in his works and from it he elaborates concepts linked to sexuality, desire or seduction. The relationships he evokes, on latent tension, violence, obsession or mystery, are obtained from a meticulous dynamic between the participating agents in the physical space, in the case of installations, or in the edition, in case of films and videos. The resulting works unleash all the detached intrigue of the images in constant suspense and tension.

José María Sicilia

Madrid, 1954

 

 

José María Sicilia was one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties who identified himself with the young generation of artists that at the beginning of that decade, took up the practice of a `material´ perspective in painting

 

From 1985, Sicilia initiates a new series of works on the subject of flowers, by which he is specially recognized in Spain. This new thematic development would take him deeper in an investigation focused in the analysis of the shape, the construction of space and the structure of light.

 

In the abstract painting that this artist has developed lately, the use of wax acquires a main role for its possibilities of dialogue with light and the creation of spaces in the pictorial surface.

Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Santander, 1954

Lives and works in New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Juan Uslé´s painting is based on his urban experience, particularly New York, where he moved in the late eighties. Visual perception, liquid – so mobile and fluid – and light structures and spaces, greatly influenced him, bringing forth a combination of geometric elements and organic elements in his compositions.

 

Juan Uslé works mixing his own colors and applying them by dispersion on canvas, building abstract images from geometric patterns, light and color. In each of his compositions he combines the search of an organization and structure, along with the appearance of the unexpected.

 

The painting of Juan Uslé analyzes, rather than expresses, the origin of his own images based on the urban experience. His practice is based on the interplay between formal antitheses, and so his work is defined as opposing dynamics.