Category Archives: Exhibitions

Julia Varela

As part of artnou, Galeria Joan Prats presents the exhibiion Lightduress by Julia Varela (Madrid, 1986).

 

In the digital contemporary landscape mediated by technological devices, the perception of images is promoted through their visible condition. This visibility is what gives an image its performative status, the possibility of being and its social and legal recognition. The series of works presented in the exhibition and their historical context will address several issues surrounding this and other topics.

 

Julia Varela is an artist who works on the medium and materiality of images in the age of digital technology. Her research focuses on the states adopted by the irrepressible who resist representation.

The physical form of her work analyses the globalization of industries, technological matter and the concept of visuality. Her work intensifies our physical interaction with devices and their mechanisms, providing an alternative understanding of notions such as context and desire.

Julia has been part of the Critical Images research program in Kungl Konsthögskolan Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and a master’s degree in Art Sculpture from the Royal College of Art London. Her latest exhibitions have taken place at: Centro de Cultura Contemporánea CondeDuque, Madrid; Fundació Suñol, Barcelona; Somerset House, London; Belgrade Cultural Centre BCC, Belgrade; Listost Gallery, Prague; Decad, Berlin; Yamakiwa Gallery, Japan; KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Galleri Mejan, Stockholm; Resartis, Melbourne; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin; CUL DE SAC Gallery, London.

She is currently a resident artist at HANGAR, Centre de producció i recerca d’arts visuals, Barcelona.

 

Caio Reisewitz

Text by Verónica Stigger (Porto Alegre, 1973), writer, art critic, curator and professor. 

 

3D tour

 

From the 11 of March, we shall exhibit Recado da Mata, the fourth exhibition by Caio Reisewitz at Galeria Joan Prats. We present 11 photographs, a video, and an audio piece.

 

Caio Reisewitz has gathered many of the photographs in this exhibition together in response to reading books written by two great thinkers and indigenous leaders working in Brazil today: A queda do céu [The fall of heaven] by Davi Kopenawa with co-authorship from Bruce Albert, and Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo [Ideas to postpone the end of the world] by Ailton Krenak. The title of the exhibition furthermore lends itself from the preface written by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s book who in turn alludes to the tale O recado do morro [The Message of the Hill], by Joao Guimarées Rosa. In the story, a homeless man and a hermit warn the people of the region about a message they claim to have received from Morro da Garça (Hill of Garça) itself. In a group of 7 men, one of them will be killed through treason. In the preface Viveiros de Castro begins with the idea of imminent death proclaimed by nature, now it is not from the voice of the hill but through the voice of the jungle. The jungle warns us that it is being exterminated by man; this is the message that Caio Reisewitz attempts to convey in his photographs.

 

One of the most recent works presented in the exhibition by Caio Reisewitz is Ambé, whose title much like the other works displayed (excluding Penedo), refers to a place name of Tupí origin. Ambé is the name of a rural community 80km from the center of Macapá in Amapá. However, in the Amazon region it also means that which is rugged, frizzy and rough. Much like the vast majority of Reisewitz’s works, in this photograph we are unable to distinguish human presence. We see only a thick tangle of branches, trunks and leaves characteristic of the Amazon rainforest. Nevertheless, the inability to distinguish human presence in the jungle does not mean it is uninhabited. The indigenous placename reminds us that for Amerindians the jungle is continuously full of a multiplicity of beings that remain invisible to us (…). By pasting fragments of different photographs, overlaying them, and re-photographing them with colour manipulation, provides the scene with a bluish tint. In Ambé, Reisewitz creates an unreal almost spectral environment; he shows an image of a dream or a vision of a shaman. Despite our inability to see the invisible beings of the jungle we are still able to sense their presence (…).

 

Always concerned about man’s rampant exploitation of nature and its dire consequences, Caio Reisewitz, in photographs such as Tipioca and Upurupã, finds a way to make this message even more eloquent, more visible. He overlaps an image of the jungle with part of the Palácio Del Planalto (the seat of Brazil’s federal executive power) which we glimpse at like a ghost or apparition floating menacingly. We must not ignore that this exhibition takes place at a time when the government is currently under the rule of President Jair Bolsonaro. Jair Bolsonaro is an admitted accomplice to the greatest devastation ever imposed on the Amazon and Pantanal in recent history. Deforestation reached its highest level since 2008. Additionally, there have been repeated attacks against the indigenous population, their territories and their given rights which were stipulated in the 1988 Constitution. In the last two years, several Brazilian cities including those in Southeast and South have been covered by smoke for days dye to forest fires. It is no longer just a message, but a loud cry of help from the jungle.

 

 

 

Caio Reisewitz (São Paulo, 1967) lives and works in São Paulo. He is one of the most important photographers from Brazil; he has focused his work on the difficult relationship between nature and people. Recent individual exhibitions include: Biblioteca, Museo de Antioquia, Colombia (2018); Altamira, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2017); Ingenios de hoy, Photoespaña, Museo de Albacete (2016); Disorder, Maison Europeénne de la Photographie, Paris and Florestas, favelas e falcatruas, Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam (2015); Caio Reisewitz, ICP – International Center of Photography, New York (2014). He has participated in Biennale de l’Image Tangible, Paris (2018); The Guangzhou Image Triennial (2017); Bienal de Curitiba, Brazil (2015 and 2013); Biennial Daegu Photo, South Korea (2014), Project LARA Latin American Roaming Artist, Colombia (2013), Nanjing Biennale (2010), Bienal del Fin del Mundo of Ushuaia, Argentina (2009 and 2007), Venice Biennale (2005) representing Brazil, and in São Paulo Art Biennial (2004). His work has been shown in international arts centers, such as Beijing Minsheng Art Museum; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami; MARCO, Vigo; CAAC, Seville; MUSAC, León; Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Goiás, Goiania; Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Bahia; Casa da Imagem, OCA, São Paulo; CCBB, Rio de Janeiro and Grand Palais, Paris; amongst others.

 

 

Cabello/Carceller

 

Text on the exhibition by Pablo Martínez’s (Valladolid, 1979. Head of Programs at MACBA, Barcelona)

 

3D tour

 

Podcast Radio web Macba

 

We are pleased to present the third exhibition of Cabello/Carceller at Galeria Joan Prats, entitled I am A Stranger, and I am Moving, in which we show recent works: drawings, installation, video and photographs.

 

The exhibition appears as a chapter of an essay, whose central theme revolves around the video, Movimientos para una manifestación en solitario (Movements for a Solo Demonstration). Alike in structure, the exhibition also addresses various topics in its Notas al pie (footnotes), through drawings and photographs. The exhibition delves into fundamental issues such as the solitude experienced by those who choose to dissent from the lifestyle of the majority, the pressure felt to maintain a belligerent stance that defends freedom of choice and the need to produce entirely the limited vehemence that we often grant ourselves.

 

The title of the exhibition is a quote from David Wojnarowicz’s last conference before he died of AIDS in 1992. It refers to the stranglehold that accompanies the sick body, a despised body that society would prefer to expel. David Wojnarowicz is one of the artists that appears in the drawings and collages of Notas al pie, found in the first room, along with Tórtola Valencia, Pedro Lemebel, Agustina González López and Hélio Oiticica. Cabello/Carceller communicate through the past and present, speaking of those who have questioned the heteronomy of their bodies, who from their dissent, were able to transform disease, rejection and hatred into poetry.

 

This hatred saw Agustina González López shot in Granada, and later forgotten, during the same period as Federico García Lorca. She was defined by ‘social madness’ and suffered persecution and ridicule for her differences. Tórtola Valencia lived her sexuality as openly as time provided her, liberating her body and with it other bodies in search for new forms of physical expression. Pedro Lemebel dared to confront the Chilean dictatorship in the streets, but also the stale sectors of the Marxist left, wary of the revolutionary force of the transvestite, of her questioning of the patriarchal order and its obligatory gender conformity. Also, Hélio Oiticica, an anarcho-artist and a pioneer of relational practices that he chose to load with revolutionary content. He paired the aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde with dancing bodies in the favelas through a festival of colour and free expression, the ‘Parangolés’.

 

The video Movimientos para una manifestación en solitario features a body that becomes a manifestation in itself, a rebellious body that questions identity norms through movements, attitudes, and a way of being that vindicates itself politically. The body is alone but empowered in the awareness that its presence is itself a transformative presence, whose femininity gives it strength while being the cause of its social marginalization. The performer holds a banner that is present in the exhibition and quotes a fragment of a well-known phrase by Baruch Spinoza, ‘Lo que puede un cuerpo’, that opens the door to the philosophical sustenance of affect theory.

 

Fernando Prats

Introductory video to the exhibition

3D Virtual Tour

 

We are pleased to present the seventh exhibition of Fernando Prats at Galeria Joan Prats, titled Primera Línea (Front line), which shows his most recent work, carried out in the context of the protests that took place in Chile during the months of October and November 2019.

 

Fernando Prats work is determined by the relationship with the energy of nature and the territory, rooted in the ties that he establishes fundamentally with his origin country, Chile. The Andes mountain range, the Atacama desert, the Pacific Ocean and Antarctica, as well as memory, are inescapable and constitutive links of his work, turning the Chilean landscape into his poetic and pictorial language from a contemporary practice. Based on the constant observation of the context, nature, the human being and his intervention in critical situations, the work of Fernando Prats is understood from the concept of “pictorial geolicity”, that is to say, painting as a mobilizing agent, an active surface that works through layers that open up to new displacements. It is perceived in this way as a process that transforms the language of the work itself from a perspective far from the rational, seeking a space of creation free of judgment that considers chance as a revealing force. The use of smoke as a primary element in his work, a materiality of ancestral use, allows, through an original technical process, to capture the traces and pulsations that become in the painting.

 

On October 18, 2019, Chile was shocked by a true social earthquake that would begin to declare itself as “the awakening of Chile”, becoming the most eloquent call, after the dictatorship, for a profound change in the country’s neoliberal and cultural economic model. In this context, and as Fernando Prats’ method of work has always been, the artist introduced himself in the center of the demonstrations in Santiago, living in first person an experience that allowed him to record the movement and confrontation of the Front Line. The materiality, the social landscape, the superposition of the bodies in resistance, the visual languages and the word build a cartography of resonances, signs and drives of a country’s memory.

 

“To this alludes “Chile woke up”, the slogan that, starting on October 18th 2019, began to run through the streets and squares of the country like a trail, unexpectedly upholstered by a crowd that emerged from the most diverse corners to dust off a forgotten language – the language of dignity – and staging the creative moment of a destitute power. (…)

 

This is what the work of the artist Fernando Prats seems to exhibit, that work has consisted since its inception in capturing that particular moment in which certain materials in rebellion (physical, geographical, domestic) knot each other releasing the mnemic energy of the country. We perceive it in a palpable way in this new show, Primera Línea, a kind of small visual atlas in motion in which fragments of texts, images, slogans, emblems and bodies shape the hectic days of a community that shows the artistic moment that precedes both the script of the story, and that which is characteristic of aesthetic work.

 

The visual daily example that Prats traces -pictoric itself and articulated by means of records and video- gives the impression of fulfilling two crucial objectives in this way: undressing on one hand the raw visuality that during Chile’s revolt forges intervened monuments, the fire of the barricades, the cobblestones torn from the sidewalks, the rewritten flag and the fighting bodies as part of a performance practice that is anticipated when making the artist’s singular, and showing on the other hand that the extreme energy that his own work liberates is not part of the muse that visits the creator in silence, but the underground power of some images of the confines of a creative multitude. This shows Prats as a determined friend of those who fight for their rights, and not of those who defend their privileges.”

 

Fragments of the text “AHORA. Acerca de Primera Línea, de Fernando Prats” by Federico Galende (Rosario, Argentina, 1965)

 

 

Fernando Prats (Santiago de Chile, 1967) lives and works in Barcelona. His work is known for the actions or expeditions undertaken mostly in Chile, including among others Gran Sur, Elephant Island, Antarctica (2011), Acción Lota, acción Géiser del Tatio, acción Salar de Atacama, acción Mina a Rajo Abierto (2006) or Congelación, on the Collins glacier, Chilean Antarctica (2002).

 

He has received distinctions as the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant (2007); artist-in-residence at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, Cologne (2003); ‘Presidente de la República del Gobierno de Chile’ Honor Grant (1997-2000); ‘Pilar Juncosa y Sotheby’s’ special award (1994) or ‘Ciutat de Palma Antoni Gelabert d’Arts Visuals’ award (2010).

 

He has participated in international exhibitions as the Venice Biennale, representing Chile (2011); Mediations Biennale, Poznan (2012); Canarias Biennial, Chile Triennial (2009), ‘Exposición Universal del Agua’, Zaragoza (2008), Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2011); or Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2004), among others.

 

He has significant public space works as Pou de Llum, Manresa, Spain (2008); Acción Medular, in hommage to General Carlos Prats González (2017) installed as a permanent work at Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos de Chile (2007) or Su vertical nos retiene, monumental work built at Parque Cerrillos, Santiago de Chile, thanks to a public competition held by the Chilean Ministry of Public Works for the COP25 (Summit on climate change), which was to be held in Santiago de Chile in December 2019. Currently the Barcelona’s Town Hall has commissioned the artist to carry out a monumental project in Plaza Pablo Neruda in hommage to the task of the republican exiles welcome undertaken by the poet.

 

Fernando Prats has just been the winner of the third edition of the call to carry out artistic interventions in ‘Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria, Museo Nacional de Colombia’, with the project ‘Aún tendría que haber luciérnagas’.

 

 

* To provide you with more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

 

madoz_sin-titulo-manos-exposures

exposure:the fact of experiencing something or being affected by it because of being in a particular situation or place (Cambridge Dictionary)

 

Exposures is a series of online exhibitions that aims to reflect on topics related to the current context, and around the general idea of ‘The body and the other’.

 

Exposures #03. The hands

 

The third proposal revolves around the hand, the part of the human body most linked to the artistic creation along with the eyes and which at the same time helps us to communicate and relate, just like the word.

 

It brings together works by Erick Beltrán, Cabello/Carceller, Victoria Civera, Hannah Collins, Enzo Cucchi, Chema Madoz, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Muntadas, Perejaume, Marcel Rubio Juliana and Julião Sarmento.

 

Our hands are taking an unusual role in the last months due to their role in the transmission of viruses. Touching things, touching our faces, touching other hands has become dangerous, hands are now forced to cover themselves with gloves, to wash constantly, not to touch, not even to say hello.

 

But we have seen how its presence has been a constant in many artistic works, from prehistoric art to the present day, due to its formal and symbolic variety.

 

The non-verbal language of gestures reveals the relationship between hand and mind. In the works we show, the hand gestures express different moods, feelings, attitudes or emotions from fear or sorrow to sensuality or complicity. Sometimes, as happens for example in Julião Sarmento’s works, its representation alludes to the totality of the human body.

 

Hand gestures also refer to social conventions, thus becoming a representation of the human condition in close relationship with culture and expression. As evidenced in some of Muntadas‘ works, this rhetorical figure can define ambition, agreement, imposition, authority or power.

 

This exhibition will be on view until September 30th.

 

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think about the size

JORDI ALCARAZ, PAULINE BASTARD, ERICK BELTRÁN, ALFONS BORRELL, CABELLO/CARCELLER, CABRITA, VICTORIA CIVERA, HANNAH COLLINS, CARLES CONGOST, LUIS GORDILLO, ANNIKA KAHRS, LOLA LASURT, FABIAN MARCACCIO, ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA, MUNTADAS, JAVIER PEÑAFIEL, PEREJAUME, PABLO DEL POZO, FERNANDO PRATS, CAIO REISEWITZ, MARCEL RUBIO JULIANA, JULIÃO SARMENTO, JOSÉ MARÍA SICILIA, TERESA SOLAR, JUAN USLÉ 

 

 

“Escric amb rius i turons / sobre el paper de les planes”    Perejaume*

 

Spring has been marked by a radical transformation of our ways of moving, relating and exchanging. Suddenly everything has changed. Our perception of everyday things and also of the most relevant things has been questioned. What seemed essential to us becomes not essential. We have realized the precariousness of life, we have known the importance of solidarity, of family, of our loved ones, of our environment. Nature and the environment have also taken a leading role that they did not have before.

 

Facing this, we have dared to ask the artists of the gallery to participate in this exhibition that we now present, with works which they have carried out during this time of social isolation. They are diverse answers to the same question, they have in common the use of paper as a medium, common for some –like Victoria Civera or Perejaume– and unprecedented for others –like Hannah Collins or Annika Kahrs–.

 

The making of these works has been able to become an escape route, a tool to continue working despite the difficulties and, at the same time, they allow the spectator to enter the intimacy of the studios and the heads of their creators. They are, in most cases, works made at home, with house’s tools, testimonies of a unique and, we hope, unrepeatable moment.

 

‘Think about the size of the universe, then brush your teeth and go to bed’ takes the title of a work by the artist Annika Kahrs. Starting with humor, it invites us to reflect on the balance between micro and macro levels and on the search for meaning and identity within the unfathomable universe of which we are a part, reflections that become fundamental in the current context.

 

The result of this exhibition has been a series of diverse works. In some cases, we see that the themes that worried the artists, before the pandemic, have maintained their leading role or, even in others, they show fragments of their work process and are linked to future projects.

 

In other cases, we find proposals that speak directly of the current moment: reflections on personal relationships, the political situation, messages from the media or vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly.

 

Finally, we would also find a third group of works that focus on observing the closest environment and nature.

 

 

To provide you with more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

 

* “I write with rivers and hills / on the paper of the plains” Perejaume

Exhibition view

Opening 16.01, 19h

Exhibition 17.01 – 30.05.2020

 

 

On Thursday January 16, we will open the seventh exhibition of Chema Madoz at the Galeria Joan Prats. We will present recent works made between 2012 and 2018.

 

The black and white photographs by Chema Madoz are characterized by their sharpness and fineness. Simple objects of everyday life appear in his pictures. The photographer has manipulated them, often combining two objects, looking for associations or paradoxes. These sculptures created by the artist are born only to be photographed, always with natural light. The change of scale and the absence of color allow us to establish a distance and at the same time distort reality, questioning ideas such as the true and the possible.

 

In the images of Chema Madoz, therefore, two points of view converge, the one from the photographer himself and the one from the viewer, who faces photography from the same place from where he faced the object. In the words of Chema Madoz, he is interested in “the idea of finding, discovering and perceiving the mystery in everyday life.” At the same time, the artist conceives reality as an exercise of reading, and with a cold look, he documents the destruction of its rules through photography.

 

All the photographs are printed on baryta paper and sulfide toned.

A Storm in a Teacup & Sideshow of a sideshow, 2012

exposure:the fact of experiencing something or being affected by it because of being in a particular situation or place (Cambridge Dictionary)

 

Exposures is a series of online exhibitions that aims to reflect on topics related to the current context, and around the general idea of ‘The body and the other’.

 

Exposures #02. The word 

The second proposal brings together conceptual practices around the word and the language, basic tools in our relationship with the world and with others.

The works of Erick Beltrán, Joan Brossa, Pauline Bastard, Muntadas, Javier Peñafiel, Perejaume, Teresa Solar and Anna Dot (guest artist) propose texts, phrases, messages, statements, which become resources for the analysis of reality, characterized by their critical and transforming character of the art system and society.

The works presented reflect the relationship between word and image and use various linguistic strategies. In the case of Teresa Solar‘s work, she plays with the aesthetics of phonetics and language learning posters. In other cases, language is used from a sound dimension -as in the work of Perejaume-, a sign –Javier Peñafiel– or poetic –Joan Brossa.

In the 2018 Muntadas work, the mechanisms of communication, language and the problematic relationship between the production of knowledge and economic power are analyzed. Also in the case of Erick Beltrán, through language, he dissects the world to classify it, categorize it, differentiate each of its elements in order to try to understand it.

In a more narrative line, Pauline Bastard‘s work starts from objects found casually that allow her to entrust strangers with the writing of creative fictions.

Lastly, we wanted to introduce an action carried out by Anna Dot at the Fundació Brossa in 2019, evidently for her connection with Joan Brossa, but also for her poetic reflection on the construction of words. 

This exhibition will be on view until 10 of June.

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Exposures#01

exposure: the fact of experiencing something or being affected by it because of being in a particular situation or place (Cambridge Dictionary)


Exposures is a series of online exhibitions that aims to reflect on topics related to the current context, and around the general idea of ‘The body and the other’.

Exposures #01. The first proposal is an adaptation of the project that we presented a few months ago for Loop’19, entitled 26 thousand light years. To the works by ANNIKA KAHRS, ALICIA KOPF and TERESA SOLAR, this time a work by PEDRO TORRES is added. This exhibition can be seen for 15 days.


26 thousand light years gathers a selection of videos that link stories or personal reflections with the space exploration, technology and science. The exhibition title, 26 thousand light years, refers to the distance that separates us from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a supermassive black hole located in the center of the Milky Way, the observation of which seems to confirm that black holes grow by absorbing minor ones and stars. The scientific speculation towards the outer space often approaches science fiction, as it appears in the works we present.

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45. I tu ni te'n vas adonar, 2019

Opening Thursday, June 25, 5-8pm
Exhibition 25/06 – 17/10/2020

 

Visit by appointment only using Form.
(T. 93 216 02 84 – galeria@galeriajoanprats.com)

Joan Prats Warehouse. Passatge Saladrigas, 5 Barcelona.

 

 

As part of Artnou, Galeria Joan Prats presents the exhibition ‘El retorn a Ripollet’ by Marcel Rubio Juliana (Barcelona, 1991), that brings together a wide range of works, made between 2018 and 2019.

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana expresses himself mainly through drawing and painting, although his approach to creation has to do with the literary essay. Large charcoal canvases and oil miniatures confer the rhythm of a fragmented story that develops an apparently linear story, with unity of time and place. We could see certain analogies with the “nouveau roman”, where different points of view are adopted away from the narrator’s unique vision and where the writing itself acquires autonomy regardless of what is written. The Dogma film script could be another reference: both use real locations, flee from superfluous effects and seek a crude realism, creating a series of rules to follow and, sometimes, to transgress.

 

Alluding to his own experiences and desires, the artist evokes a summer day in which an stranger unknowingly becomes the main character of a singular story. Located in a coastal city near Barcelona, different sequences invite us on a journey in which, following a phenomenological method, contemplation, drift and falling in love offer a precise description of the environment.

 

The narration follows in the footsteps of a young man, from the train station to the city center, passing by the beach, the Yacht Club and various shopping streets, creating a cinematographic record of the places evoked. It also shows us bodies enjoying the water, the view of the sun over the sea, a kiosk, the facade of a theater, stains of humidity on the wall, a flower, a group of friends on a bar´s terrace… everything is there, present in the memory, although everything could be imagined.

 

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana (Barcelona, 1991) studied at Pau Gargallo School of Art and Design (Badalona), where he graduated in 2007. He later studied the Fine Arts degree at the University of Barcelona, which he completed in 2013.

 

Since then, he has shown his work in the following exhibitions: Surfeit, Fundación Arranz-Bravo, l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona (2018); Swab Art Fair, Barcelona, represented by Passatge Studio gallery (2016); The muscles of Zarathustra (with the writer Victor Balcells Matas), Passatge Studio, Barcelona (2016); Pasajes, La Puntual de Mercantic, Sant Cugat, Barcelona (2016); Carles Boïges, cycle of exhibitions, with the collaboration of Tom Carr and his team, TCTeamWork, Badalona (2014); University of Fine Arts, Barcelona (2014); Drawing the night (group exhibition), Anquin Gallery, Reus, Tarragona (2014).

 

He has been nominated for different awards: Bienal Torres Garcia, Mataró, with the work Spectro, 2016; Ynglada-Guillot Foundation, with the drawing Geschlagen, 2015, exhibited at Espai Volart, Barcelona; Drawing Prize of the Güell Foundation, exhibited in Palau Güell, Barcelona, 2015-16; Art Biennial : Tapiró Painting Prize with the drawing What time is it?, 2013.

 

In 2021 he will present an exhibition at Espai 13 of the Miró Foundation, in a cycle curated by Pere Llobera.

Galeria Joan Prats

ARCO Madrid

 

26/02/2020 – 01/03/2020

 

Booth 9C09

 

LUIS GORDILLO . CHEMA MADOZ . MUNTADAS . FERNANDO PRATS . JULIAO SARMENTO . JOSÉ MARÍA SICILIA . PEREJAUME . ALICIA KOPF . TERESA SOLAR . JUAN USLÉ . PABLO DEL POZO . VICTORIA CIVERA . HERNÁNDEZ PIJUAN

 

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Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Opening: 10.10.2019,  7pm

 

Friday October 11, 6.30pm, talk between Juan Uslé and curator Javier Sánchez Martínez

 

The title of the new exhibition by Juan Uslé in Galeria Joan Prats, ‘Unsettled’ alludes metaphorically to painting, the central subject of his entire work.

“Unsettled” means unstable, but also variable, restless, something that includes opposites, or a paradox. In Uslé’s paintings, the stripes of color fluctuate, they do not have a definite beginning and end, and refer to the passage of time, the hours, the seasons, the changing landscapes, such as Bernia, a mountain range located in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula, a place of inspiration for Uslé, among many others.

 

Juan Uslé’s work reflects on the possibilities of painting. In his words: “Speaking of painting, I would also talk about his tremor, his ‘no fixation’, his journey or, even better, what we understand as displacement.”

 

Formed by repeated strokes, although never identical, his work is characterized by movement and rhythm, and invoke the surrounding environment, and, at the same time, the energy of the body’s drives. Uslé creates a pictorial language where formal or metalinguistic aspects are mixed with his life experience, in addition to allusions to time and the creation process itself. According to Juan Uslé: “Time is what we have left. I conceive it as a horizontal surface where past and future moments are deposited and transfigured. Many of my small works seem to go on, spread in space. They suggest a “landscape” –let’s call it this way- or space of multiple juxtaposed horizons.”

 

In the exhibition, Uslé presents small formats, which create a close and intimate relationship together with large-scale works, the largest dimension he has worked with and which he started in 2017. Small works are organized into families, and speak of repetition, but also individually contain their own identity.

 

The exhibition is completed with two large format photographs. They make allusions to the painting and invoke the recollection and emotion of the discovery.

Like his paintings, they question our ability to see, think, perceive and feel.

Annika Kahrs

Opening: 14.11.2019 from 18 to 21h

Exhibition: 20 and 21.11.2019 from 11 a 20h and till 30.11.2019 by appointment (t. 932160290 o galeria@galeriajoanprats.com)

Venue: Joan Prats Warehouse. Passatge Saladrigas, 5 Barcelona. Metro Poblenou

 

 

With motive of the Loop Festival, we present in our venue Joan Prats Warehouse a selection of recent videos and a sound installation by our artists Alicia Kopf, Annika Kahrs and Teresa Solar which link stories or personal reflections with the space exploration, technology and science.

 

The exhibition title, 26 thousand light years, refers to the distance that separates us from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a supermassive black hole located in the center of the Milky Way, the observation of which seems to confirm that black holes grow by absorbing minor ones and stars. The scientific speculation towards the outer space often approaches science fiction, as it appears in the works we present.

 

Alicia Kopf’s video Speculative Intimacy: An Understanding Of Control, 2019, suggests an emotional science fiction perspective in order to originate new stories about the interaction between bodies, human and non-human. The movie takes place in a near future where the borders between public and private have disappeared, the lives pass in continuous exposition. Michelle, its main character, investigates a concept in crisis: ¿What is intimacy? and talks about this topic with his non-human partner.

 

Annika Kahrs presents two works. The video solid surface, with hills, valleys, craters and other topographic features, primarily made of ice, 2014, shows a planetary where a starry sky is projected, at the center of which appears a circular light which would appear to be the moon, but it turns out to be a focus. In this work from 2014, the artist uses picture and narrative to make a portrait of Pluto, the vision of which was about to change, since New Horizons, an unmanned mission from NASA, was headed to its orbit. Finally it overflied it on July 14th, 2015, and could, for the first time, photograph it closely. Until then, the scientific illustrations about the planet were based on speculation.

 

The other work by Annika Kahrs is the sound installation think about two black holes colliding, then brush your teeth and go to bed, 2019. This work in two parts is a sound installation exploring gravitational waves and their detection. In 2015, the first direct observation of gravitational waves was announced by LIGO. This moment was a record of the collision of two black holes. In the first part of her installation, using a toothbrush as an instrument Kahrs has recreated the sound of their detection alongside audio data courtesy LIGO. For the second part, Kahrs has recorded interviews between Dr. Keith Thorne of LIGO and contributors from different fields.

 

In Teresa Solar’s video Ground Control, 2017, the artist transforms herself into the clay ball that turns on the potter’s wheel. The image of the turning body is accompanied with fragmented stories that connect the accident of the space shuttle Columbia, exploding into pieces due to a failure in its protective shield, with the personal injuries suffered by the artist herself. The title Ground Control has a double meaning: it is a direct reference to the material, ground or clay, and the pressure exerted on it when working on the potter’s wheel and it also refers to the operations center from which the development of a spaceship is monitored. Through the title, this minimal communication experience and conflictual balance between subject and subject matter increases in scale, linking with space travel.

 

 

Alicia Kopf (Girona, 1982) lives and works in Barcelona. Her work reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns. The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts Literature Theory and Comparative Literature. She has exhibited in museums and art centers such as Accademia Di Spagna, Rome (2019), MAC La Coruña in the 15th Naturgy art exhibition (2018); Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Mazcul, Maracaibo (2017); CCCB, Barcelona, Museum of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia (2015); Goethe Institute, La Capella and MACBA, Barcelona (2014); Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona (2013); Bòlit La Rambla, Gerona (2011) or CaixaForum, Barcelona (2009). Recently, she has exhibited in Azkuna Centroa, Bilbao, drawings of the series ‘Conquest drawings’, within the exhibition ‘Nunca real/Siempre verdadero’ curated by Iván de la Nuez. As a novelist, her most important work is ‘Brother in ice’, published in 2015, with which she won the Documenta Prize 2015, the 2016 Llibreter Prize, the 2016 Ojo Crítico Award and the Cálamo Otra Mirada 2017.

 

 

Annika Kahrs (Achim, Germany, 1984) lives and works in Hamburg. She has been awarded a number of prizes and scholarships including the Max-Pechstein-Förderpreis–Stipendium, of Zwickau, in 2019 and the George-Maciunas-Förderpreis in 2012, donated by René Block. In 2011 she won first prize at the 20th Bundeskunstwettbewerb of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Kahrs has exhibited internationally, including Kunstverein of Kassel (2018), Kunsthalle Lingen (2017), Cité International des Arts (2016), Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2015), Kunsthalle Bremerhaven (2015), On the Road exhibition in Santiago de Compostela (2014), the Bienal Internacional de Curitiba, Brazil (2013), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2013), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2012), Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2011), Goldsmiths University, London (2011), and the Velada de Santa Lucia festival in Maracaibo, Venezuela (2010).

 

Teresa Solar (Madrid, 1985) lives and works in Madrid.  She has been a resident and visiting professor in the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste from Stuttgart (2016), finalist in the Award Cervezas Alhambra de Arte Emergente (ARCOmadrid 2017) and of the program for mentors Fundación Rolex (2016), she received the production scholarship of Fundación Botín (2014), of CAM (2011) and the award Generaciones (2012). Currently she presents in Index, Stockholm Ride Ride Ride, an individual exhibition that had been in Matadero (Madrid) with the title Cabalga, Cabalga, Cabalga. She has recently shown Flotation Line at Der Tank, Basel (June 2018) and in the program Compositions of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend (September, 2018) and has been part of the 2018 expedition “The Current” organized by TBA21-Academy. She has exhibited individually at La Panera Lleida (2016), Matadero Madrid (2014) and CA2M Móstoles (2012) and has participated in collective exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich (March, 2018), at Kunstverein Braunschweig (June, 2018) , in the section “El futuro no es lo que va a pasar, sinóo lo que vamos a hacer” to ARCOmadrid (February 2018), at Kunstverein München, Munich (2017), the Fundación Marcelino Botín Foundation, Santander (2016) and Macro, Roma (2015), among others.

Untitled (Terrace), 2017. Detail

Opening Thursday, September 5, 5.30 – 8.30pm

Exhibition 05/09 – 04/10/2019

Talk with Janosch Jauch and curators Gabriel Virgilio Luciani + Gisela Chillida: Friday 06/09, 7pm

 

 

As part of artnou, Galeria Joan Prats presents the work by Janosch Jauch (1985, Karlsruhe, Germany).

 

Janosch Jauch‘s works are developed through the process of bringing together photographic images of installations, digital interventions, and physical surfaces using photographic silver emulsion. This layering leads to a symbiosis of all of these production steps and thus to a work that, despite its diverse forms and materials, has become an image that is equally determined by all the techniques that went into its formation.

 

The delimitation of his work in the sense of production aesthetics accounts for a large portion of his intermedia art, which has as its central focus the experience of the open-ended piece. His works also project us to a universe where the artificial interferes with the natural.

 

 

 

Janosch Jauch (1985, Karlsruhe, Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf, where he has been graduated in sculpture and painting at the Kunstakademie (2014), under the teaching of Georg Herold, Andreas Gursky and Ludger Schwarte.

 

He has shown his work at Bistrot21 (2018, Leipzig), Kunsthaus Essen (2019), Bistrot21 (2018, Leipzig), Storage Capacité (2018, Berlin), Swab (2018, Barcelona), Espositivo (2018, Madrid), Museum Kunstpalast (2013, Düsseldorf), among other places.

 

 

To provide you with more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

Alicia Kopf

Opening, June 13th, 7pm

Exhibition: 14/06 – 31/07/2019

Thursday 25.07.2019, 7 pm : Sound and performative action with Nil Ciuró + Núria Guiu + Alicia Kopf

 

 

 

Speculative Intimacy proposes an emotional science fiction perspective to originate new stories about the interactions between bodies, human and non-human.

 

Resignify the sci-fi to a speculation on desire – that gravitational attraction – in a bet for a de-hierarchization of points of view among actants recognizing the obsolescence of some of the representation tools that have been given to us. A transposition of scales, points of view and genres.

 

Philip Roth exposed the question of intimacy in spatial terms: “the great joke that biology is spending on you is that you get to intimacy before you know anything. In the initial moment you understand everything. At first, each one is attracted to the surface of the other, but also intuits the total dimension. And the attraction does not have to be equivalent: one is attracted by one thing, and the other, by another. It’s surface, it’s curiosity, but then, zas, the dimension. “

 

Zas. The dimension.

 

Their new entry portals, such as online dating apps and the ever-increasing approach of technological devices to the body, attract us to an event horizon unattained until now. Speculating in the trail of Agustín Fernández Mallo, “it may not be the Internet of things but the love of things that saves us from cosmic solitude …”

 

Alicia Kopf

 

(Full correspondence between Alicia Kopf and scientists Augustín Fernández Mallo and Carlos Pobes)

 

 

Speculative Intimacy is the second exhibition by Alicia Kopf at Galeria Joan Prats. It’s her most recent work, which brings together drawings, photographs, writing and a video made with the collaboration of the choreographer and dancer Núria Guiu.

 

From the exercise of drawing and writing, Alicia Kopf (Gerona, 1982) reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns. The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts Literature Theory and Comparative Literature.

 

She has exhibited in museums and art centers such as Accademia Di Spagna, Rome (2019), MAC La Coruña in the 15th Naturgy art exhibition (2018); Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Mazcul, Maracaibo (2017); CCCB, Barcelona, Museum of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia (2015); Goethe Institute, La Capella and MACBA, Barcelona (2014); Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona (2013); Bòlit La Rambla, Gerona (2011) or CaixaForum, Barcelona (2009). Until September 22nd, she exhibits in Azkuna Centroa, Bilbao, drawings of the series ‘Conquest drawings’, within the exhibition ‘Nunca real/Siempre verdadero’ curated by Iván de la Nuez.

 

As a novelist, her most important work is ‘Brother in ice’, published in 2015, with which she won the Documenta Prize 2015, the 2016 Llibreter Prize, the 2016 Ojo Crítico Award and the Cálamo Otra Mirada 2017.

 

 

To provide you with more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

I will make up a song (desert entrance-1), 2018

 

Opening March 14th, 7 pm | Exhibition March – May 2019

 

Next Thursday, March 14th we will open the sixth exhibition by Hannah Collins at Galeria Joan Prats, where we will present her most recent work I will make up a song, 2018; along with The Fertile Forest, 2013-5 project and the photograph Family, 1988.

 

The title for this exhibition is a part of the title for Hannah Collins’s new film, I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with the night air above my head, created with musician Duncan Bellamy, which will be shown at Fundació Tàpies next June.

 

I will make up a song talks about the work of the Egyptian Modernist architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989), who drew on traditional sustainable mud constructions to create new towns New Gurna and New Baris. Fathy tried to find a new way forward through sustainable practice, using natural earth materials, and to create a new context where a theatre would be a normal part of rural life in a country with ancient roots. His ideas have urgency today, as we look for a sustainable future. Through these images, Hannah Collins explores the relationship between human body, scale and history, and shows the modest but meaningful materials she encountered while making the work in the Egyptian desert.

 

Finding new ways forward is one of the central themes of Hannah Collins’s exhibition created at a time of global focus on the choices and forces at place in contemporary Western existence.

 

The Fertile Forest is a work that also deals with tradition and the need to establish new relationships with our environment. It is an ongoing project to document the way a tribal group understand the surrounding forest, which is in fact more like a garden as they use over a thousand plants for their everyday wellbeing. Hannah Collins spent a month with the Cofán tribe in the remote Colombian Amazon basin, photographing the plants according to their teachings. The texts accompanying the photographs are the result of Hannah Collins’s conversations with the leader of the tribe under the influence of yagé (ayahuasca). The mirrored vitrines contain gold mirror that reflects us back at ourselves through the plants.

 

The earliest Family is a black-and-white image of a group of silent speakers that were commonly used for street music, especially reggae, created by West Indian in London, but which were photographed in Hannah Collins’s studio.

 

The exhibition gives an anxious but simultaneously optimistic view of our times and our need to preserve knowledge and created bridges at a global scale. All the works focus on the act of communication and the desire for poetry and beauty. The work of Hannah Collins makes visible the need for the preservation of meaning and nature, both threatened by their invisibility.

 

 

Hannah Collins (London, 1956). From 1989 to 2010, she lived and worked in Barcelona, exhibiting at Galeria Joan Prats since 1992, and today lives between London and Almeria, Spain. In addition to having obtained the Fulbright scholarship and having been nominated for the 1993 Turner Prize, she has recently received the SPECTRUM 2015 International Photography Prize, awarded by the Foundation of the Lower Saxony, which included an exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, travelling to the Camden Art Centre in London and the Baltic Centre in Newcastle. Among other museums and art centres, she has exhibited at Centre Pompidou Paris; FRAC Bretagne; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Museo UNAL, Bogotá; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; MUDAM Luxembourg; Tate Modern, London; Seoul Museum of Art; VOX image contemporaine, Montreal; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fundació La Caixa, Madrid and Barcelona; La Laboral, Gijón; Artium, Vitoria; CAC, Málaga.

 

For more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

Arco 2019

ARCOmadrid 

27/02/2019 – 03/03/2019

Booth 9C09

 

AÏDA ANDRÉS RODRIGÁLVAREZ, PEDRO CABRITA REIS, VICTORIA CIVERA, HANNAH COLLINS, HERNÁNDEZ PIJUAN, FABIAN MARCACCIO, MUNTADAS, PEREJAUME, PABLO DEL POZO, CAIO REISEWITZ, JULIÃO SARMENTO, JOSÉ MARÍA SICILIA, TERESA SOLAR, JUAN USLÉ

+

CAIO REISEWITZ Meeting with the artist and book signing, Altamira

Thursday, February 28, in our booth at ARCOmadrid 2019

Matèries en erupció 1975-1985

Opening, December 13th, at 7pm / Exhibition, December 2018 – February 2019

 

 

We present, within Any Guinovart, the exhibition Matèries en Erupció 1975-1985, with a selection of works of a relevant decade for Guinovart’s career, years in which he established an intense relationship with our gallery and also signified his international acknowledge with exhibitions at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York (1979), at Espace Cardin in Paris (1979), at Rizzoli Gallery in New York (1979) and at the Venice Biennale (1982).

 

As Alexandre Cirici mentions: “during the seventies, Guinovart had been dissolving operations of purification, of deliverance, of what Jung named “the descent to Hell” and had been finding the equilibrium of a complete maturity which touches in all the registers of his complete, splendid and critic vision of human society and the material environment that surrounds him, with the confidence of a great organist”.

 

The exhibition we set out is partly inspired in the spring of 1979, a date when three significant exhibitions were being placed in the city of Barcelona, at Galeria Joan Prats, at Galeria Trece and, above all, Matèria-suport-estructura at Fundació Joan Miró, three synchronized exhibitions which passed by three different ways but with the same shared destiny: the approximation to reality.

 

Of all Guinovart’s works of this moment stands out the labor with clay, introduced since a travel to Algeria, where he was shocked by the presence of soil, the desert and the adobe architecture. The main protagonist of this period is the material, the fibre cement too, the contrast between hardness and roughness of the support and the absolute spontaneity of graphics. Although Guinovart is an artist who transformed his works from “internal combustions”, he was also conditioned by the world that surrounded him: the nature of Castelldefels, where he has his atelier, the rural environment which marked his childhood, like Agramunt, and also the cities of Barcelona, Paris or New York.     

 

“I constantly need the resource not of transgressing, but of getting out of the limits of what painting is. For example, collage, the elements that go from inside to outside and from outside to inside: many times someone has made the mistake of positioning me as an artist of collages, because there has been in me an intention of working from inside to outside rather than the opposite. It isn’t about gluing nor everything appeares from the base of the volcano. There is a feeling of the material being threw from inside, just in the opposite way of how we understand the collage. It isn’t the fact of painting-painting, it is a more existentially poetical aspect. What worries me is the background issues”

 

(Interview to Guinovart, El Guía magazine, October-November, 1991)

 

 

Josep Guinovart (Barcelona, 1927-2007). After an autodidactic education, he started his career as a painter in the forties in Barcelona. His paintings, marked by figuration, evolved to abstract collage linked to informalism by politicizing and expanding himself until breaking the limits of pictorial language, approaching to sculpture and installations. He received several prizes and awards, like the prize Ciutat de Barcelona d’Arts Plàstiques (1981), the National Award of Visual Arts of Spain (1982) and the National Award of Visual Arts of Generalitat de Catalunya (1990). Among his monographic exhibitions stands the one at Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, in Bratislava (2004), the one at La Pedrera in Barcelona (2002), Guinovart. Itinerari 1948-1988, at Tecla Sala in Hospitalet (1989) which traveled to Germany (Vila Merkel, Esslingen am Neckar; Museum Bochum, Bochum; Katalanischen Sommers in Hamburg), the exhibition at Fine Arts Museum of Long Island (1987), Matèria-suport-estructura, at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (1978) and Contorn-entorn at Galeria Maeght in Barcelona (1976). In 2018, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, it have been celebrated Guinovart Year with exhibitions in various centers in Catalonia and abroad.

 

 

Galeria Joan Prats would like to thank Maria Guinovart and the Fundació Espai Guinovart for their collaboration in the realization of this exhibition

 

For more information and images, contact  galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

The Lisbon Totem #3, 2017

Opening: 26.9, 7 pm 

Exhibition October – November

 

 

We are pleased to announce Pedro Cabrita Reis´ first exhibition in our gallery, presenting a selection of recent works of sculpture, paintings and photography.

 

The work by Cabrita Reis includes a great variety of media, varying from photography and drawing to large-scale paintings and sculptures, composed of industrial and often found materials, as in the case of Floresta, 2017, which we are presenting in the exhibition, and they frequently reach architectural dimensions. In this exhibition, we encounter works made of different materials such as steel, wood, aluminium, glass, enamel, bronze and acrylic. In the words of the artist, “Everything that exists is material which can be used in the construction of a work of art”. Consequently, he does not establish hierarchies between the objects and materials he work with. For Cabrita Reis, the material is the way of looking and thinking that changes everything.

 

Cabrita Reis´ work investigates the limits between architecture, sculpture, painting and photography, while he primarily considers himself a painter. His work is three-dimentional, often very personal and aim to alter, define or question the limits of spatiality. The meaning remains mysterious and fascinating. The contemplation takes form in the material, reaching the spectator, provoking new questions and linking imagination to experience.

 

Pedro Cabrita Reis began his career in the 1980s, as one of the most distinguished artists of his generation, introducing an universe of archaic and mythical references, collective memory and individual revelation. His works have had a great impact on the Portuguese and international culture, incorporating, into the more radical modern heritage, the possibility of returning to more traditional artistic disciplines: drawing, painting and sculpture.

Aïda Andrés Rodrigálvarez & Pablo del Pozo

JOAN PRATS warehouse, Passatge Saladrigas 5, Barcelona

By appointment at 932 160 284

Exhibition: 05/09/2018 – 26/10/2018

 

As part of artnou, Galeria Joan Prats presents the work of two young artists, Aïda Andrés Rodrigálvarez (Barcelona, 1985) and Pablo del Pozo (Badajoz, 1994).

 

Their works deal with the relationship that is established between the individual and the space surrounding, from an everyday point of view. The territory and nostalgia, the search for a refuge, the passage of time are important topics in their work, together with the environment. We will show installations of the two artists, that have been made from found objects and materials exposed to the elements.

 

Aïda Andrés Rodrigálvarez is interested in the impression that light, the environment and the passage of time is producing on paper. The techniques of lithography and pinhole photography allow her to work with a dilated temporality, as well as to investigate the color. In her artistic practice, paper and fabrics are left at the mercy of the elements, thus becoming photosensitive materials.

 

On the other hand, 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.

 

 

 

Aïda Andrés Rodrigálvarez (Barcelona, 1985) lives and works in Barcelona. She owns a Master’s Degree in Artistic Productions and Research (2015-16) and a a Degree in Fine Arts (2014) from the University of Barcelona. She have also an Architecture Degree from the ETSAB, Barcelona (2010). She has individually exhibited at Fundació Arranz-Bravo at L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (2017), in the Acadèmia de Belles Arts de Sabadell (2016) and at Tinta Invisible, Barcelona, (2014). She has been granted by Institut Ramon Llull for the Jeune Création Européenne Biennale, has received the production grant Felicia Fuster (2018), Guasch-Coranty  (2016) and the prize Arranz-Bravo (2017).

 

Pablo del Pozo (Badajoz, 1994) lives and works in Barcelona. He owns a Degree in Fine Arts (2014) from the University of Barcelona (2017). He has individually exhibited at Centre Tecla Sala de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat), at Le Beffroi de Montrouge, París (2017) and at the Acadèmia de Belles Arts de Sabadell (2016). He has been selected to the Biennal de Valls, the Guasch-Coranty prize (2017) and to the Jeune Création Européenne Biennale (2017-8) with exhibitions in several European cities like Montrouge, France (2017); Hjørring, Denmark; Cēsis, Latvia; Cluj, Romania (2018); Como, Italy; Figueres and Amarante, Portugal (2019). He also has been granted by a production scholarship by the Sala d’art Jove de la Generalitat (2017), where he will show during June 2018.

 

3w3a0094w

Opening June 21st, 7 pm        22/06/2018 – 14/09/2018

 

Galeria Joan Prats presents Footprints, the first exhibition of the architect Josep Lluís Mateo.

 

 

Through a selection of works and projects, the exhibition approaches, in a non-chronological way, the trajectory of Mateo, looking for ways to narrate architecture from within the topics inherent in its practice. Mateo’s architecture is characterized by the inheritance of modernity, which is interested in the pursuit of light, an intense dialogue with the context, and the connection between the idea and the material. His projects are reflective and strategic; they speak about space while taking care of the relation between the mineral and the vegetable.

 

Scale models, photographs, videos, collage and sketches make it possible to apprehend the complexity of his creative and constructive process. We find, for example, historical materials of emblematic projects such as the urbanization of the medieval town of Ullastret, mockups that reflect the development of a constructive concept, as is the case of the facade of the International Convention Centre of Barcelona, or photographs that show the interaction of the work with its surroundings.

 

“A journey, a path, is made up of a succession of points, of steps, of footprints, which, viewed as a whole, indicate a direction, reveal (or not) their meaning.

Here, without pretending to draw the line, we show a few points, some footprints, in our journey.

So others can draw it.

These moments are explained by the materials that produced them.

Although architecture is a complex phenomenon in its result (it deals with matter, space, use, economy…), in its production there is an initial moment of synthesis that generates the energy needed to develop it.

There is also a final moment that synthesises, in a second, like a flash, all the effort that has been made.

To show these initial materials, which condense the idea, and some final documents that shed light on the reality, is the purpose of this exhibition.”

Josep Lluís Mateo

 

 

The exhibition highlights the work of photographers who accompany the vision of Josep Lluís Mateo as Aldo Amoretti, Gabriele Basilico, Jordi Bernadó, Jan Bitter, Luc Boegly, Ferran Freixa, Adrià Goula, Albert Masias and Xavier Ribas.

 

 

Josep Lluís Mateo is an architect from the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura of Barcelona (ETSAB) and doctor “cum laude” from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Since 2002, he is Professor of Architecture and Design at the ETH-Eidgenössische Technische Hochscule Zürich. He has given conferences and courses in the main academic and professional institutions of the world, among others: visiting academician in the J.P. Getty Center in Los Angeles, visiting professor at Harvard University-GSD and at AHO Oslo.

 

In his career, awarded with the A+2011 Prize for the best professional career, some works standout such as the urbanization of the medieval town of Ullastret, Girona (Santander Biennial Award 1991); the plan for the organization of the sports area of the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona (special mention FAD Awards for Architecture and Interior Design 1993); the housing complex on the Borneo pier in Amsterdam (CEOE Award 2001); the single-family house in Mallorca (Prize for the Best Work in the section of single-family housing 1997-2001 granted by the Official College of Architects of the Balearic Islands); the CCIB – International Convention Centre of Barcelona (Top International Purpose Award 2009 – C&ITE Magazine and Gold for the Best Convention Centre Abroad 2010 – M&IT Industry Awards); the Headquarters of the Deutsche Bundesbank in Chemnitz (2004, Germany); the Sant Jordi Residence Hall in Barcelona (Archizinc Trophy 2008); the WTC Almeda Park building in Cornellà, Barcelona (A+ Award for architecture for the work 2010); La Factory, office building in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris (NAN Architecture and Construction Award 2010); the Headquarters of the company PGGM in Zeist, Holland (NAN Architecture and Construction Award 2011); the Filmoteca de Catalunya (2012, Barcelona); the Centro de Cultura Contemporânea, as a culminating piece of the renovation of the historical centre of Castelo Branco (2013, Portugal); and Bayonne. Entrée de ville, urban redevelopment of the urban front of the Adour river, including building project (2016, France). His work has been widely published and exhibited in the MoMA (New York, 2006), in the Pavillon de l’Arsenal (Paris, 2009), the Venice Biennial (2012) and in the Galerie d’Architecture (Paris, 2013), among other places.

 

 

To provide you with more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

muntadas-contexto

 

Galeria Joan Prats presents the exhibition Edicions II by Muntadas, which gathers a selection of serial works the artist has developed since 2003 up to the present day in different formats: publications, prints, videos, objects, installations and other graphic materials. This exhibition completes the work started in the exhibition Edicions, made at Galeria Joan Prats in 2003.

 

«The first time Muntadas talked to me about the exhibition Edicions II at the Galeria Joan Prats, he referred to it as an “exhibition of deltas”. I asked him to elaborate: “my projects are one, they are units. But these units diversify into huge quantities of postcards, there could be up to 100.000 postcards, and could even include 17 metal plaques distributed throughout the city in the form of signage, or a web page. So, the project finally appears as the sum of three collections of remains; that is of deltas” (…)

 

Editions allowed Muntadas to achieve a more porous and plural circulation by its multiplication and intervention capacities across diverse media and in different time frames. While his projects usually consist in one video, one installation, or one urban intervention, his publications are rarely made up of a single unique element (…)

 

A truly genuine notion of project has also emerged throughout Muntadas’ career. The artist tackles the project, on the one hand, as the logic behind a series of procedures, based on the repetition of processes and strategies and on the other, the project defines itself following the logic of a work in progress, generating moments of aperture. In this way, the notion of project, as Muntadas states, has allowed him to depart from a type of intuitive and immediate practice while helping him to structure flexible environments, open to unpredictability, developing platforms to work in the long run (…)

 

The editorial work and the publications is where Muntadas has experimented more precociously and with more intensity than in any other medium the collaborative methods that have ended up impregnating the whole of his work. Here is where one finds the deployment of strategies that catalyse translation no longer, as just a metaphor, so much as in particular a process of bidirectional exchange.»

 

Fragments of Oriol Fontdevila’s text Piscine Obliviousness. Amphibious editions, from the exhibition catalogue.

 

Muntadas, born in Barcelona and living in New York since 1971, was a pioneer of video and installation in the mid-seventies, and continued working with photography, video, installation, audio, and urban interventions. Iterations of his iconic projects, such as Between the Frames: The Forum (1983-1993), The Board Room (1985), and the on-going series On Translation (1995- …) and The Construction of Fear (2008- …) – have been exhibited in institutions and galleries of the USA, Latin America, Europe and the Mid-West. Muntadas participated in the Documenta’s 1977 and 1997 editions, the Whitney Biennial of 1991, the Bienal de São Paulo of 1983, the Bienal de La Habana of 2000, the Taipei Biennal of 2002, the Gwangju Biennale of 2004, the Instanbul Biennal of 2011, and the Paris’ La Triennale of 2012. In 2005, he represented Spain in the Venice Biennale, where he created an integral project about the architectonical evolution of the Biennale throughout its history. His works have been included in exhibitions at MACBA, Barcelona; Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Weserburg Museum, Bremen; Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; and Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo. Since 2011 he has been working on the project Asian Protocols, presented to the public for the first time at Total Museum of Seoul (2014), and for the second time at 3331 Arts Chiyoda of Tokyo (2016). The next step of the project will be its development in China.

 

A catalogue has been edited especially for the exhibition

La locura del ver, 2016-17

We present Phasma, the seventh exhibition by José María Sicilia in Galería Joan Prats, where we show his recent work, with abstract pieces that incorporate fabrics and embroidery and whose shapes come from sonograms.

 

The word that entitles the exhibition, Phasma, of Greek origin, designates the specters and apparitions and refers, as described by the artist, to “something that appears and disappears, a butterfly that goes by flapping its wings” and that “speaks of the light as a fold”.

 

In the exhibition, together with the Phasma series, started in Japan, we find the series of El Instante, collages made from drawings of the last ten years, and works from the series La Locura del ver. The creation process of this last series is linked to a sonographic technology that results from an experiment carried out by Thomas Young in 1801, which allowed for the detection of the wave nature of light through its diffraction across two networks successively distanced from a luminous source. This experiment serves as a starting point for a software that allows Sicilia to decompose the sound in order to create cartographies of lines and shapes, some drawings, painting, collage and embroidery compositions that result in the works of La Locura del ver.

 

This technology gives José María Sicilia a tool to reach a new depth. In this new development of his work we find everything that was already present in his previous artistic evolution: the strength of color, the movement of light, a fondness for the organic and the process of unification and opposition that, since the eighties, his painting have shown. His first production had a strong expressionist character and deepened in the monochrome of white. Later on, his career is marked by the discovery of wax as a material, by the appearance of flowers, beehives and also by photography. Sicilia is a restless creator who has based his work on the questioning of shape. He is an artist who interrogates, who does not accept molds and feels the need to break the formats, summoning the emotion of the spectator.

 

José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) lives and works in Madrid. He has recently exhibited in Museo Casa de la Moneda and Calcografía Nacional, Madrid (2017); Musée Delacroix, Paris (2015), Palacete del Embarcadero, Santander (2014); Matadero, Madrid and Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art (2013); Hospital de la Caridad, Sevilla (2012); Maison Erasme, Brussels and Amos Anderson Art Museum of Helsinki (2010); Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum (2008). His work is present in important public and private collections, among which stand: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MOMA, New York; Fundació ‘la Caixa’, Barcelona; Colección Banco de España, Madrid; Collection Ville de Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Torino; MNCARS, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The New York Public Library, New York.

Joan Ponç

We are pleased to present the exhibition dedicated to Joan Ponç and Joan Brossa, to be opened on Thursday, November 30rd, and where we will show works by two of the most significant artists in the recovery of avant-garde art in our country after the civil war, united by a creative and personal affinity from the late 40s to the early 50s and also linked to the history of Galeria Joan Prats, where they both would exhibit on several occasions.

 

In 1982, Joan Brossa showed for the first time in his exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats his object and visual poems, poems that he was making since 1954 and that were by then practically unknown by the public. Later, they would be shown in other exhibitions at the gallery in Barcelona (1989, 1995, 1997) and in New York (1989), and at the Basel Fair (1989). On the other hand, Joan Ponç began his collaboration with Galeria Joan Prats in 1978, with the exhibition Fons de l’ésser. He also exhibited in 1983, Nocturns, in 1987 with drawings from Pre-Dau Al Set period, in 1994 and 1996 with drawings from Suite Geomètrica and in 1980 at the FIAC art fair in Paris.

 

As Arnau Puig says in the text written for this exhibition, “A temperament and character of the dimensions of Brossa was almost destined to come across someone like Joan Ponç, who came down from the clouds”. This taste for magic, divination and the occult would be one of the points of union between the two artists, who met in 1946. That year they would publish together with Arnau Puig and Enric Tormo the only issue of the magazine “Algol”, which wanted to be a revulsive in front of immobilism and the loss of idealism of their contemporaries. They proposed a renewal of the look that is also visible in the monotypes that Ponç made to accompany the issues of the magazine and that moves away from the predominant naturalist figuration in Spanish art of the time.

 

In addition to this interest in new artistic forms, the works by Brossa and Ponç coincided thematically in a concern and criticism of society, along with an interest in popular culture, theatre and magic that we already pointed out. That’s why, in those years, collaborations between the two took place: the unpublished book Parafaragaramus (1948), two issues of the magazine “Dau Al Set” (January, 1949 and an unpublished one), the book Em va fer Joan Brossa (1951), where a portrait of Joan Brossa by Joan Ponç appears, considered the most direct and sincere portrait the poet has ever had. The Brossa-Ponç relationship was also reflected in the poems by Brossa alluding to Ponç and in several Ponç drawings: the Dibuixos podrits (1947) and the Metamorfosis (1947), the Joan Brossa-Joan Ponç suite (1947), the cover of the book Dragolí by Brossa (1950), or the gouache Brossa, Brossa (1950), that we show in this exhibition.

 

Brossa and Ponç were at the time two standard bearers of the aesthetic renovation, following the steps of J.V. Foix and Joan Miró. Brossa, who had met Miró in 1941 through the hat maker and patron Joan Prats, at J.V. Foix’s home, would introduce them Joan Ponç. “Dau Al Set” would help to restore bridges with the avant-garde of ADLAN, promoted by Joan Prats and Joaquim Gomis, and GATCPAC.

 

After this period of affinity and creativity, in 1953 Joan Ponç went to Brazil, and each artist continued his own journey. On his return to Catalonia, in 1962, Brossa was already very far from magic surrealism and was moving by an antipoetry linked to reality while doing plastic experiments of what would be his visual poetry. Their bond would be diluted. For Brossa, Ponç would always be linked to “Dau Al Set”.

 

This exhibition aims to show the trajectories of the two artists: a first part, with works from the period “Dau Al Set”, the moment of greatest affinity between Joan Brossa and Joan Ponç, and a second part of the exhibition, with later works, that allow to see their evolutions in the plastic field, and that they are reflected in the same way as in the Joan Brossa-Joan Ponç suite (1947).

 

fotstand-4-ed

ARCO Madrid. 21/02/2018 – 25/02/2018

 

CABELLO/CARCELLER
HERNÁNDEZ PIJUAN
LOLA LASURT
PEREJAUME
JAVIER PEÑAFIEL
FERNANDO PRATS
CAIO REISEWITZ
JULIÃO SARMENTO
JOSÉ MARÍA SICILIA
TERESA SOLAR ABBOUD

 

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Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye (part 3)

We are pleased to present Julião Sarmento’s fourth exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, titled Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye (part 3), in which we will show his recent work, with installation, sculpture and painting.

 

The title of the exhibition recalls that of the first exhibition held at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957, which included paintings by various artists and in which the installation and assemblage pioneer, Edward Kienholz, participated.

 

In the exhibition, the installation Crash Dummy, 2016, and the sculpture Broken Alice, 2014, coexist with a series of paintings that show triangular shapes, delicately drawn, based on the fundamental principles of fractal geometry, and other works inspired by the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen of Degas. This diversity of supports and techniques present in the exhibition is characteristic of the artistic practice of Julião Sarmento and, on this occasion, stands out for the combination of materials that could be defined as poor with materials subject to advanced technological processes.

 

Julião Sarmento produces a work that adopts multiple forms with drawings, paintings, sculptures, performances and videos that speak of the artifices of seduction and the mechanisms of desire. From its beginnings, in the middle of the seventies, the work of Julião Sarmento has been characterized by its archival character. Thus, in his works, they can appear feminine silhouettes, architectural plans, literary fragments and objects.

 

Often, these coded iconographies explicitly present us with the signs needed to identify to the source of his imagery and its meanings. This constant oscillation between appearance and reality, fiction and documentation, invention and fact with which Sarmento confronts us is not at all a gratuitous game. The assemblages fashioned by the artist play on this dialectic of superficial interpretation, where many elements are perfectly identifiable, even banal or anodyne, and deeper interpretation that drives us to seek correspondences, links and relations without realizing that the very fact of carrying out this search is itself the meaning we are supposed to discover.

Paris Photo 2017

Galeria Joan Prats is presenting Hannah Collins (London, 1956) and Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942), for Paris Photo Fair.

 

The method used by Collins in The interior and the exterior, Noah Purifoy, 2015, pays tribute to Walker Evans, through documentation of the sculptures by African-American artist Purifoy (1917-2004) and also with voices recordings.

 

Muntadas, continues his research on the places of power with Architektur / Räume / Gesten II, 2017. In these 10 triptychs, Muntadas assembles archival images, connecting places of power with gestures. The artist thus highlights the way in which the architectural form crystallizes gestures and decisions of power.

 

PARIS PHOTO Booth D15.
Grand Palais. 09-12 NOV 2017

Godafoss (God's waterfall), 2016

Alicia Kopf | Cabello/Carceller

Lola Lasurt | Perejaume

Teresa Solar Abboud | Fernando Prats

 

Exhibition: 6-22 September, Tue-Fri 11-14h & 16-20h

 

On the occasion of the sixth edition of Artnou, Galeria Joan Prats presents Confluències, an exhibition that brings together works by the artists Alicia Kopf, Lola Lasurt and Teresa Solar Abboud, who establish a dialogue with works of other artists of the gallery, chosen by them: Cabello/Carceller, Perejaume and Fernando Prats. Thus emerge dynamics based on the exchange of views between artists of different generations, which lead to connections and new readings, sometimes direct, sometimes unexpected.

 

 

Alicia Kopf presents the photographic series Waterfall Chasers (2015), which symbolically alludes to the thaw as a moment of uncontrolled emotions, from representations of waterfalls. The idea of water fluidity links these works to a series of drawings by Cabello / Carceller, titled Autorretrato como fuente (Self-portrait as source) and Fuente (Source) (2005).

 

The work by Lola Lasurt Preparation for Wit Boven Zwar (2016), composed of oils on canvas and costumes, proposes a reconstitution of the Carnival of Aalst of 1946 from a 16mm film of that time. With a similar approach, Perejaume, in the series of drawings Ball de muntanyes (2007), associates the folkloric dances to the mountains, using, as is common in its practice, references to the Catalan culture that refer to universal preoccupations.

 

Teresa Solar Abboud, with Doble Mordido (Double Bite, 2013), investigates the tools and photographic processes that intervened in the experiments of Harold Edgerton, questioning concepts such as protection, concealment or overexposure. In the same way, Fernando Prats, in Sismograma Chuquicamata (2008), uses para-photographic techniques, such as smoked paper, in order to fix moments or traces of an action in a landscape.

Exhibition view

The artist proposes an itinerary in which the dialogue that takes place between the works and the spectator becomes fundamental. A dialogue that often moves away from words to give way to admiration, contemplation and interest in understanding the subtle, silent and dreamlike atmosphere that surrounds his universe. Self-presentation takes on new importance from materials and also through the titles of works, as Autoretrat (Self-portrait) or Autoretrat al taller (Self-portrait in the studio).

 

The artistic practice of Jordi Alcaraz transcends the traditional categories of painting, sculpture and drawing to approach the assemblage and installation, reflecting on the notion of volume, language as an idea and the passage of time. According to J. F. Yvars, “the works of art are organisms created from living materials, subjected to the alchemy of the elements and expressive techniques, which impose their verisimilitude over time. They breathe, moan, ring, crack up, and readjust in the required harmony that will sketch out the unfinished symphony of his plastic art”. The combination of materials as diverse as mirrors, books or methacrylate makes the elements interact by learning how to breathe, moan or sound together.

 

The text Plastic, which Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja dedicates to Jordi Alcaraz, focuses his attention on the plastic, on the methacrylate more concretely, and concludes as follows: “For some time the transparent “crystal” plastic has appeared to display a quality that has no name. This quality, somewhere between watery and airy, but in essence rhetorical, has been grudgingly described as something secret that cannot be divulged since its limits are still not known. Experts proclaim it as a shiny but also extremely unctuous material. It can be used for anything. It is the material that substitutes all others. The fact it shines is not a shortcoming. And it is a substitute for everything”.

Exhibition views Galeria Joan Prats

 

Through ceramic sculptures, videos and photographs, the artist outlines a discontinuous narration, starting from her own body and linked to space exploration. Precisely, the works of the exhibition revolve around the relationship of the artist’s body with her work materials, essentially the ceramics. Through the performative link and the double meaning between subject and material, between structure and mass, Teresa Solar reflects on concepts such as control, resistance, a definitely precarious balance of sense and accident.

 

The title of the exhibition, Ground Control, has a double meaning. On one hand it is a direct reference to the material, ground or clay, and the pressure exerted on it when working on the potter’s wheel. The body of the artist adopts a position of resistance to control the material, which is plastic and dynamic, this effort makes the body operate as a static structure, as an object, as matter. Through the title, this minimal experience of communication and conflicting balance between subject and matter increases in scale, linking with space travel: “Ground Control” is the center of operations from which the operation of the flight of a spacecraft is monitored. Serving the two for the purpose of a successful expedition, one cannot exist without the other and vice versa, they are part of the same mechanism, a single subject divided into two bodies.

 

The idea of tense balance between oneself and the world is present in the videos of the exhibition. In Being a person you did not know you were, we see a puppet that adopts the role of the divided adult, of an unknown entity who is born in us and who looks at us from the outside, who turns us in foreigners inside our body. Continuing with the idea of the divided subject, in the video Ground control, the artist is transformed into the clay ball that turns on the potter’s wheel. The image of the turning body is accompanied with fragmented stories that connect the accident of the space shuttle Columbia, exploding into pieces due to a failure in its protective shield, with the personal injuries suffered by the artist herself.

 

This double relationship is also present in the sculptures of the series Crushed by pressure. The pressure of the metal bars and cords repeats the process of creation of the ceramics, remembering the pile of rubble of an accident, in which the ceramic becomes the body of the subject, controlled and stabilized through structures that deform it. Ceramics allow us to emphasize the contrast between the primitivism of a material and a millenary technique, with the technological sophistication of the ceramic skins that cover the rockets.

 

In the pieces Pie de foto: Masa and Chamber, Breath, the artist in the potter’s Wheel sign language on White clay balls, creating words that are then compacted and deformed by their own weight, forming a language that exists in the phisical space. In Pie de foto: Masa, ceramic columns hold the photograph of a bone while the engraved stretch marks themselves mean “mass”; the missing body is completed trough the text that supports it.

 

 

Teresa Solar Abboud (Madrid, 1985) lives and works in Madrid. She has been a resident and visiting professor at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart (2016), she was a finalist of the Rolex Mentorship Program (2016), she received the production grant Fundación Botín (2014), the production grant CAM (2011) and the prize Generaciones (2012). She has individually exhibited at La Panera Lleida (2016), Matadero Madrid (2014) & CA2M Móstoles (2012). Recently she has been selected as finalist for the Prize Cervezas Alhambra of Emergent Art during ARCOmadrid 2017. She will show soon at Haus der Kunst and at Kunstverein München.

 

Alfons Borrell

We are pleased to announce Alfons Borrell’s new exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, next Thursday December 15th.

 

After the exhibition dedicated to him by Fundació Miró, which gathered sixty years of artistic practice, we present the most recent work of this exceptional creator, who conceives painting as a space of relationship with the world and, at the same time, as an impulse, an emotion and that has stayed away of the tendencies and the prevailing movements throughout his trajectory.

 

His work is characterized by the importance of color and debate between subtlety and intensity, between openness to nature and introspective recollection. Bound since 1955 to the language of abstraction, he has been influenced in different moments of his life by Anglada Camarasa and Brossa, two artists who, beyond an aesthetic, provided him a vital and ethical attitude towards art. Borrell’s work has been and is currently intense and constant, always moving in parameters that he repeats with rigor and dedication.

 

The color in Alfons Borrell’s work is an invading agent that moves and fluctuates; the artist defines it as an extension of the person, which blends you with the environment, “if you walk through a forest full of fir trees you turn green, if you could immerse yourself in the sea you would get out blue… ” He says” I would like to be painting “. It is a vision of color and painting, linked to the concept, to the thought, and also to the experience. Borrell uses only five pigments extracted from the earth, green, blue, orange, ocher and gray; while white, from the surface of the canvas, emerges as an apparition of light.

 

To this work of color, which he has been using repeatedly for its symbolic connotations, the perception of presences and absences, from a particular experience of limits, is added. In his paintings, vertical lines cross the surface symbolically designating a presence, horizontal lines refer to the horizon, and the inability to contain color matter, which sometimes overflows marked margins, shows us the experience of the unlimited.

 

Borrell’s work needs an active contemplation on the part of the viewer, who establishes a relation of tension with the works. Their experimentation does not depend on codes of interpretation or previous knowledge, but his painting seems to go directly to the observers, interpellating them, but always leaving a space of freedom as a possibility to inhabit its language.

 

Alfons Borrell (Barcelona, 1931) lives and works in Sabadell. After an initial stage of formation in figurative painting, he got started in abstraction in 1955, with works close to informalism. Far removed from the academic art, he was part of Grup Gallot, an iconoclast and revolutionary group linked to gestural abstraction. This radical experience allowed him to find his own way, of sobriety and silence, throughout the 60’s. From 1976, he began to title his works with the exact date of its completion, like a journal, the same year that he participated in the group show Pintura 1, in the recently inaugurated Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona, where he would return with a solo show two years later and, in 2015, with a great retrospective. Among the recent years’ exhibitions, stand the one held in 2006 at Centre Cultural Santa Tecla, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, which traveled to Museu de Sabadell, the one about work on paper held in 2011 at Fundació Palau de Caldes d’Estrac and the one held the same year at Fundació Vila Casas. He has participated in group shows at MNAC, Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, MACBA, CCCB and Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Flanders Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In 2014 he received the GAC prize, an honorary award in recognition of his long career.

El doble no existe, 2016

 

There is always a suspicion behind all our actions and wills. Someone is watching us all the time from ourselves. The one who does not rest while we sleep, who looks out on the slip and reflexes, who judges us constantly, who takes us as hostages in altered states. Who is this other one?

 

The double is the most trenchant critique to the self-proclaimed integrity of the ego. It causes conflicts and discussions in fields ranging from the philosophical to the social. Is the double a projection of the ego or an entity with its own agenda? Who rules the subject? Is it a neural effect or a symbolic construction? Why this double never disappears? Is it a mythological question? Dichotomy or multiplicity?

 

The project by Erick Beltran, to be displayed in two spaces, Galeria Joan Prats and Joan Prats Warehouse, brings together works and research carried out between 2014 and 2016, as a visual essay or “Bilder Atlas” (iconic atlas), a dialogue that emulates the one established between conscious and unconscious.

 

Erick Beltrán (Mexico City, 1974) lives and works in Barcelona. He has participated in international exhibitions such as Bienal de São Paulo (2014 and 2008), Of Bridges and Borders, Valparaíso, Chile (2013), Tapei Biennial (2012), Biennale de Lyon (2011), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010) and Trienal de Puerto Rico (2009 and 2004). Among his recent solo exhibitions stand The Fallen Tree, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2015), Atlas Eidolon, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2014), Piezas de juego, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; The Witgenstein Archives/Gallery Volt, Bergen, Norway (2013), La part abyssale, Centre d’art Contemporain La Synagogue, Delme, France (2012), The World Explained, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (2012), Modelling Standard, FormContent, London (2010), Tolv/Zeigarnik effect, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2009), Ergo Sum, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2006), Punch – Drunk, SMAK, Ghent, Belgium (2005). He has exhibited in national and international art centers such as New Museum, New York; CCA Watis, San Francisco; MALBA and Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; WUK Kunsthalle Exhergasse, Vienna; Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona; MUSAC, León; cGac, Santiago de Compostela.

El doble no existe / El doble de las mil caras

[The double does not exist / The one-thousand-face double]

 

A shaman letting run his soul off in the shape of a dog.

A patient watching how he is operated while levitating in the surgery room.

The succubus that does not let us breathe during the sleep.

A person having a wake for a mirror upon someone’s death at home.

The homunculus operating from a control room.

Mr Hyde attacking Dr Jekyll.

The werewolf stealing the next harvest to the devil in order to give it to men.

The devil composing a symphony to Tartini.

Policemen destroying the matrixes of fake banknotes

Bonnet looking at 10 cm-height-women wearing a 16th Century-style hair coming into their room.

An artist painting a secret room where the king is getting rotten.

A woman attacked by her own hand.

The king’s doctor taking vital signs of a puppet that is being treated.

Franco caressing Saint Teresa’s hand.

A stone buried in exchange of a seaman who never came back.

Zeus turning into Amphitryon and Mercury into his assistant Sosia in order to seduce an unreachable mortal.

That guy who is looking at us from behind our shoulder.

Some dogs playing poker and a satyr playing the flute.

Two snakes that are a human skull, that is a war goddess that kills her 400 brothers from her mother’s belly.

 

What makes move our organs beyond conscious decisions?

Why cannot we control our dreams?

Why is there the sensation that our consciousness lives inside a body and is not the body?

Why upon death something remains and something leaves?

Who is talking during altered states of consciousness?

Why can we listen to a voice inside our mind?

Does the duplication of something imply the taking of an original?

Why does the unique represent an actual value?

How is built the idea of officiality?

How are these conceptual orders conveyed to a people’s organization?

Why the concentration of truth implies physical strength in the world?

What defines a unity’s limit?

What happens when a body lives inside another body?

What happens when a body is not tied up to the temporary narrative?

Why the beyond world shows up in the shape of spectres, devils and hells?

Under what circumstances can we see ourselves out of ourselves?

When does man perceive himself as a unity?

When does man become  a universe’s reader?

How can extra-corporal journeys be made?

What kind of relationship do fairies, witches, zombies, vampires have with the double’s world?

Can we make the double’s shut up?

 

The man’s ego is the unit under which everything is ordered and classified. Nevertheless a doubt always nests this psyche, another thing looms out through a breach a little further, this is something that denies its independence and ineffability

 

The way that the unity has to understand the universe in all multiplicity is the creation of an alter ego that feeds back the looking.

 

Erick Beltrán

12-habitar-el-vacio

Curated by Ramón Castillo

 

 

The exhibition Habitar el vacío, curated by Ramón Castillo, gathers for the first time four Chileans artists,

Alfredo Jaar, Iván Navarro, Fernando Prats and Raúl Zurita, at Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona.

 

The four artists, from different conceptual approaches, sensibilities and aesthetic ideologies, perform works of complaint or criticism to human tragedies occurred in different parts of the world, with a language that forces the limit of the visual and textual, through various editorial, material and technologic devices. This extreme dimension of their researches becomes the metaphor of the title Habitar el vacío: art as a way to overcome isolation or lack of empathy among people.

 

Their works converge in the generation of an alert state of the viewer-reader versus territorial, economic, political and social issues affecting people in different places of the planet where hope becomes a revolutionary act. We are introducing the visual and textual research of the four artists who challenge the senselessness and the contemporary experience report.

 

Raúl Zurita (Santiago de Chile, 1950) lives and works in Santiago de Chile. His work is marked by the Military Dictatorship, during which he was detained and tortured. Poetry, performance and urban interventions are part of a repertoire of actions that he developed critically, creatively and interdisciplinarily. Raúl Zurita alternates his literary work, poetry recitals and teaching work at Diego Portales University and Harvard. He has won major awards such as the National Prize for Literature in Chile, Pablo Neruda Award, the Italian Pericle d’Oro Award, the Guggenheim and DAAD scholarships, among others.

 

Fernando Prats (Santiago de Chile, 1967) lives and works in Barcelona since 1990. He has participated in international exhibitions such as Venice Biennale, representing Chile (2011); Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland (2012); Canary Islands Biennial (2009); Chile Triennial (2009) and Exposición Universal del Agua, Zaragoza (2008). He has exhibited his work in international art centers such as Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, Fundació Miró, Barcelona or Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile.

 

Alfredo Jaar (Santiago de Chile, 1956) lives and works in New York since 1982. This artist, architect and filmmaker has exhibited in art centers of all around the world and has participated in biennials such as Venice Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009, and representing Chile, 2013), São Paulo Biennial (1987, 1989, 2010) and Kassel Documenta (1987 y 2002). Among his solo shows there are the ones in New Museum of New York, Whitechapel gallery of London, MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Moderna Museet of Stockholm, and Museum of Contemporary Art de Chicago. He is National Prize for Art in Chile.

 

Iván Navarro (Santiago de Chile, 1972) lives and works in New York since 1997. He has participated in international exhibitions such as Venice Biennale, representing Chile (2009), Prospect2 of New Orleans (2011), la Havana Biennial (2012) and The Disappeared/Los Desaparecidos, exhibition organized by North Dakota Museum of Art that travelled through North and South America from 2005 to 2009. His solo exhibitions include those in Matucana 100, Santiago de Chile (2015 and 2007), Museum of Contemporary Art, Aukland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia (2015), and Frost Art Museum in Miami (2012).

 

 

The artists will be present during the opening.

A catalogue has been published for the exhibition.

Alex

Alex is a fictional character created by the artiste Pauline Bastard. With the help of an anthropologist, a lawyer, psychoanalyst, stylist, decorator and writer, Alex has been imagined and followed for more than a year in the process of integration in real life, faced with the construction of its social, administrative and emotional existence.

 

The exhibition design allows visitors to slip inside the character’s life: benches and cushions with printed objects, standard furniture and personal effects of Alex, the display evokes a domestic interior and allows to discover 6 videos of Alex‘s life, from its genesis to its “first steps”.

A casting to choose the right Alex, the meetings of professionals, the moments of the construction of a character without a past… we are attending to fragments of the beginning of an existence, a creative process, not an avatar, but a person made of flesh and bone who face up urban and social relations. The result is an experiment movie: neither fiction nor documentary, dozens of hours of film are evidence of the existence of Alex.

 

With this Project, Pauline Bastard raises a number of questions.

How to manipulate the creative form? How to manipulate the natural and the supernatural without falling into chaos?

Alex talks about the construction of identity, of our society. Who is Alex?

 

This project has been awarded by Audi Talent Award and had receive the support of CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques).

 

Pauline Bastard creates complex narratives developed through installations, films and sculptures containing and relating to her experiments. Through collaborations she questions the construction of the self and its place in the contemporary world.

Pauline Bastard creates stories, making them happen, using situations as matter and taking seemingly unrealizable experiences as material for production.