Category Archives: Exhibitions

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

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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.

 

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

 

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).

 

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

 

+ info

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.

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”.

Teresa Solar

 

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

Text by Alicia Kopf

 

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

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.

 

We present Fabian Marcaccio’s work in a exhibition titled Family-Group-Cluster-Swarm at Galeria Joan Prats, showing his most recent work, 3 Dimensional paintings that behave like sculpture and installation.

 

As the starting point of the exhibition, Marcaccio researched specifically the meaning of family, group, cluster and swarm in society as well as in painting itself. The viewer is introduced in the first room by a swarm-like pictorial installation. Entering the main room, where a family, group, cluster of 3D works and rope paintings seem to tell a story.

 

Fabian Marcaccio has been one of the pioneers of digital painting in an attempt to redefine the pictorial genre, extend its temporal and spatial parameters, and track the integration of the hand-made and the machine-made. In the nineties, he worked with composition and digital printing and, later on 3D printing, to create pictorial works that he calls Paintants, a neologism from painting and mutant. Marcaccio considers painting as a constellation in content change, sometimes rendered as panels, sometimes as 3D configurations, sometimes as animations, and sometimes on an environmental scale.

 

Fabian Marcaccio was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1963, and lives and works in New York since 1986. He has taken part in exhibitions at international art centers and museums. His recent exhibitions include Paintant Stories at Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro (2014), Variants at Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2013), Some USA Stories at Museen Haus Lange / Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (2012), The Structural Canvas Paintants at Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2012) and at Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011). In 2011 he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture.

We present Hernández Pijuan 1977-2005, an exhibition dedicated to the 28-year-long close collaboration between Joan Hernández Pijuan and Galeria Joan Prats. The pieces selected correspond to the broad period of 1977-2005, but mostly focusing on the very last years of his career.

 

Although the set of pieces corresponds to a large period of the artist’s production, this exhibition does not have a retrospective character.

 

Galeria Joan Prats will present works on paper (gouache, watercolour, pencil drawing…) and oils on canvas of different sizes, as well as a selection of the archive of the artist – sketches & photographs, thus allowing the discovery of his creative environment and some of his projects or work processes.

 

This exhibition intends to be a tribute to the artist, an expression of gratitude and friendship but also a recognition and showing of a work that is still as contemporary as it was in its beginnings.

 

 

Joan Hernández Pijuan (1931-2005) has been one of the most internationally renowned Catalan artists. He has taken part in exhibitions at prestigious international art centres and has also received several awards, as for example the Premio Nacional de Arte Gráfico, in recognition for his trajectory (2005), the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona of Plastic Arts (2004) and the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1981).

 

Among his most outstanding exhibitions it could be pointed out his participation at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005); Tornant a un lloc conegut… Hernández Pijuan 1972-2002, at the MACBA, Barcelona (2003), travelling exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel, the Konstshalle Malmö and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna de Bologna; Hernández Pijuan-drawings 1972-1999, at the Rupertinum Museum in Salzburg (2000) and Espacios de silencio 1972-1992 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1993), that was also exhibited at the Museo de Monterrey, México.

 

Recently his work has been shown at a retrospective exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; at the exhibition Farben der erde, at the Altana Kulturstiftung in Bad Homburg, Germany and at the exhibition La distancia del dibujo, travelling to the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca, the Museu de Montserrat and the Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma de Mallorca.

Following a line of long-haul research about the relevance of producing artworks, Perejaume proposes a minimalist experiment, with two new works.

 

Throughout his artistic production, Perejaume has always questioned the space devoted to works of art. The space, understood as a physical place, such as outer space or place of exhibition –gallery, museum- but also the mental space. To make room for artworks also refers to a temporary notion: how much time do we dedicate to see the works? What place do they have in our lives?

 

The exhibition can be seen as an intimate and theatrical representation in two times.

 

The anteroom, with dark walls, introduces us to the gallery with the phrase: Don’t you think that artworks are starting to be as valuable as the space they occupy? There are so many works; can’t you hear them repeatedly saying to their visitors and to their makers: “We don’t fit, please make more room for us”?

 

The first room is dedicated to a single photograph in black and white, made from the exposure of 140 still frames from the film “El Ball de l’Espolsada”, which was filmed in 1902. The film was commissioned to Napoleón studio in Barcelona when, in the early twentieth century, this popular dance was recovered after fifty years in oblivion. The restoration of this material allowed to rediscover the original choreography. The film, which is one of the oldest footage of Catalonia, belongs to the Ethnological Museum of Barcelona and is deposited at the Filmoteca de la Generalitat de Catalunya.

 

In the second room, we found an imposing movie projector that presents the film Projecció cinematogràfica del llegat Cambó. Cambó’s legacy is a collection of fifty two paintings by European masters from the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries (Veronese, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rubens, Metsys, Gainsborough, Le Brun, Goya, Fragonard, Quentin de la Tour, Lucas Cranach, Tiepolo…). It is the selfless contribution of more value that MNAC has received and it comes from the political and patron Francesc Cambó (1876-1947). In the projection, the legacy is flowing rapidly as a chromatic flare.

 

 

—-

 

Perejaume (Sant Pol de Mar, 1957) has received awards such as Premio Nacional de Arte Gráfico de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes, Premio de Artes Plásticas del Ministerio de Cultura and Premi Nacional d’Arts Visuals de la Generalitat de Catalunya. He has recently curated the exhibition Maniobra de Perejaume at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. He has shown his works in exhibitions such as ¡Ay Perejaume, si vieras la acumulación de obras que te rodea, no harías ninguna más!, La Pedrera, Barcelona; Imágenes proyectadas, CAB Centro de Arte Caja Burgos, Burgos; Amidament de Joan Coromines, Es Baluard, Palma de Mallorca, La Pedrera, Barcelona; Retrotabula, Palacio de los Condes de Gabia, Granada, Artium Vitoria. He has participated in internationals biennials such as Prospect 1 New Orleans (2008), Art Unlimited, Basel (2006), 51st Venice Biennale (2005). He has recently published Mareperlers i Ovaladors, Edicions 62, Barcelona (2014) and Paraules Locals, Tushita edicions, Barcelona (2015).

Prova rebutjada (Tout va bien)

 

Prova rebutjada (Tout va bien) -*Evidence rejected (Everything’s OK)– offers a journey through works united by their liminal character and by their poetic way of determining their political status, common thread of their method of resistance.

 

The name of the exhibition combines the titles of two works presented in the exhibition: Prova rebutjada, by Joan Brossa, and Tout va bien, by Muntadas. While the first title asserts with administrative rigor a reality without revealing that it has no escape, Tout va bien brings an immediate comfort, but projecting a sarcastic precariousness. This declaration, contained in the signs of its ambiguity, casts an ironic light on these triumphalist slogans of the 2000s, slogans that did not hesitate to relate the economic effervescence with promises of happiness. The exhibition brings together, in this line, works that mobilize strategies and micro-political spaces to question hegemonic discourses. In front of the apparent consistency of the dominant narratives, most of the works opt for a juxtaposition of ideas and a brief structure reminiscent of the form of the haiku.

 

Prova rebutjada (tout va bien) refers to the rhythm of gestures presented in the works: vital and content modest gestures that, instead of claiming their impact, they influence with critical tactics against the established narratives.

 

Artists:
Joan Brossa, Cabello/Carceller, Hannah Collins, Carles Congost, Ariadna Guiteras, Lola Lasurt, Mariokissme, Muntadas, Javier Peñafiel, Perejaume.

 

 

Curated by: Olivier Collet & Patricia de Muga

solid surface, 2015

 

Galeria Joan Prats is pleased to present solid surface the first exhibition of Annika Kahrs in Barcelona, which brings together her most recent video works.

 

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

 

Annika Kahrs presents solid surface, with hills, valleys, craters and other topographic features, primarily made of ice – her latest video work about the dwarf planet Pluto. This film is set in a planetarium with a projected starry sky, where in the centre a round spot of light is located, invariably suggesting the moon. After watching carefully, the celestial body appears to be a spotlight that detects this nocturnal illusion and reveals the white projection screen. In this work, the artist resorted to imaginative as well as narrative devices to paint a portrait of Pluto, as our vision of it seems destined to change soon: a NASA mission will reach its orbit and, for the first time ever, close-up photographs will be taken of it. So far, even scientific illustrations of the planet have been based on speculation, and this imminent shift from imagined picture to actual depiction, according to Kahrs, is why Pluto became the ideal protagonist for her work.

 

The relationship between fiction and reality also plays a role in the video Sunset-Sunrise. In this film the viewer understands that he or she is observing a sunset: the star glowing red on the horizon. Gradually the picture lightens, a glistening veil moves across the picture from below, finally the projection is pure white. The riddle unravels itself as the camera moves backwards, disclosing that we are in a lecture theatre. We are not the witnesses of a strange natural spectacle, but rather just viewers of a projected sunset that is slowly dissolved in real sunlight, as the blinds in the room are raised.

 

In études cliniques ou artistiques, Annika Kahrs films a woman, who adopts body positions that seem to be gymnastic exercises or yoga postures. It is the artist herself who is giving the performer the precise instructions according to photographs from the Parisian psychiatric hospital, la Salpêtrière, showing the poses of the ‘major hysterical seizures’, a term coined by Charcot. In this film Annika Kahrs deconstructs not only the male gaze, but also, she unmasks photography as a staged medium in terms of documentation.

 

 

Annika Kahrs (Achim, Germany, 1984) lives and works in Hamburg. She has been awarded a number of prizes and scholarships including 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 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). She will participate in the 5th Tessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art next June.

Nidal

We are pleased to present Nidal, the first exhibition of Victoria Civera at Galeria Joan Prats, which includes a series of objects and drawings made by the artist in recent years.

 

Nidal* symbolically describes Victoria Civera’s way of thinking in her work process, providing an order of rhythm and movement in her pieces, which grow slowly and haphazardly, weaving an infinite membrane made of materials, objects, surfaces, color and differentiating skins, as if they were isolated words.

 

Its development is a reflection without pause, between silences and whispers, where Civera seems to invite us to a journey, to a concentric experience based on a logic of poetical thought, where the artist goes to meet with the phrase, event, subject and work. Mixing vocabularies and hybridizing playfull syntax, exposing cracks where figuration and abstraction overflow their conventional boundaries, her work grows joining friction and senses, facing her childhood and recreating it with reflection, drama and humor.

 

The words of the poet Paul Valéry could approach us to the echo of Victoria Civera’s work: “Poet, it is not one image that I seek, but the marvelous group of all possible”.

 

 

* Creation, desire, illusion; principle, foundation, reason why it happens or pursue something: belief.

Refuge, interior, home, thinking, introspection, double mirror.

 

 

Victoria Civera (Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955) lives and works between New York and Saro, Cantabria. Among her solo exhibitions, there are Sueños inclinados, IVAM, Valencia (2011), Atando el cielo, CAC, Malaga (2010), Túnel eterno, Palacio de los Condes de Gabia, Granada (2006), and Bajo la piel, Espacio 1, MNCARS, Madrid (2005). She has also participated in exhibitions in art centers such as CGAC Santiago de Compostela, MAS Santander, Caixaforum Barcelona, Mumok- Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Viena, MACBA Barcelona. Her work is at institutions and museums’ collections such as MNCARS, IVAM, CAC Málaga, Es Baluard de Palma, Artium Vitoria-Gasteiz, Colección Banco de España, Col·lecció “la Caixa” or Patio Herreriano Valladolid.

Altamira

We are pleased to present Altamira, the third exhibition of Caio Reisewitz at Galeria Joan Prats, which brings together his most recent work, such as photographs, collages and video.

 

Altamira refers to a Brazilian municipality, where a forest called Belo Monte, bordered by the Xingú river, will disappear due to the construction of the third largest hydro plant in the world. This project has been widely contested since it will represent a huge environmental impactand will put at stake the survival ofmanyindigenous peoples.

 

Caio Reisewitz’s work explores the exploitation of ecosystems by the man and their destruction involved. Paradoxically, in his photographs, we see an untouched nature where human presence seems deleted. The artist often records the hectic attempt of his country to achieve economic development, and details the global ecological problems arising from the indiscriminate destruction of Brazilian forests, leaving a space for the hope that nature and human culture can share the same interests someday.

 

As a background to the show, there it is the recent disclosure in Brazil of several scandals involving corruption, such as a major operation organized by the federal police called “car wash” (Operação Lava Jato) that has affected some public figures, and also a state of anesthesia and fantasy, an emotional conjunction that is present in all the works shown.

 

 

Caio Reisewitz (São Paulo, 1967) lives and works in São Paulo. He has recently presented his first big solo exhibition in USA at the ICP – International Center of Photography of New York. He has taken part in Daegu Photo Biennale, South Corea (2014), in Curitiba Biennale, Brazil (2013), in LARA Latin American Roaming Artist Project, Colombia (2013), in Nanjing Biennale (2010), in Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina (2009 y 2007), in Venice Biennale (2005) representing Brazil, and in São Paulo Biennale (2004). His work has been exhibited in art centers of Europe and South America such as Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Goiás, Goiânia, Casa da Imagem OCA São Paulo, Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Grand Palais de París, Centro de Arte Huarte de Navarra, Somerset House of London. In 2015 he will present a solo exhibition at the Huis Marseille Museum voor fotografie of Amsterdam and at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie of Paris.

El Partido. Mujeres casadas contra mujeres solteras, una iniciativa de Manuel Ramírez, barman del Club Federico García Lorca, Bruselas, 1976, 2014

Lola Lasurt’s work takes its roots from a testimonial material belonging to a distant past, from a temporary space that the artist has never been at hand, and works on des-time aspects, avoiding the historic doctrine as an open and self-critical enterprise and surveying it all, both through the phenomenon of recognition and by means of the generation of strangeness.

 

With a critical approach to the idea of nostalgia, Lola Lasurt carries out an analysis of the recent past characterized by a paradigm shift in the social, political and self-referential facts in the art world itself, working on the relationship between this space and the how-to-build oneself and the collective identity, in an organization system which does not distinguish between culture and heritage, popular and institutional initiative.

 

The artist is interested in individual historical time, in its relationship with behavioral guidelines of the hegemonic culture, and in its processes for building collective symbols.

 

Her work is formalized through the pictorial installation, video, and is shown through collaboration processes. On the occasion of this exhibition, the first exhibition of Lola Lasurt in Galeria Joan Prats, the artist presents the following works:

 

Exercici de ritme (sobre el monument a Francesc Layret), 2010-2014, project based on the monument to Francesc Layret, politician and labour lawyer, located in Plaça Goya, Barcelona. By means of an analogue register (super-8 film), Exercici de ritme, proposes to convert the monument into the stage of a love affair between the four characters that make the sculpture, through the cinematic rhetoric of eroticism. This way, Exercici de ritme is an exercise of experimentation with film media that aims to revive in the present time a public sculpture that easily goes unnoticed in the city layout. By approaching an illusory and a priori illogical sculpture, Exercici de Ritme wishes to convey the monument to Francesc Layret from the area of hegemonic history and collective struggles to a personal field.

 

El Partido. Mujeres casadas contra mujeres solteras, una iniciativa de Manuel Ramírez, barman del Club Federico García Lorca. Bruselas, 1976, 2014, project that recreates the football game in which married women played against single ones in the Communist Party annual festival in Belgium in 1976, that comprises a group of seventy-six paintings in the form of animated boards, made from moving images of the super-8 film documenting the original match. This work, the same way as it happens with Exercici de ritme, could be placed at the junction between the personal level, in this case linked to gender issues, and collective interests, as it reviews relevant aspects of recent history concerning moments of change.

 

Amnèsies, 2011, series of paintings based on pictures from the artist’s family album, where they appeared cut out by her father who, at a time, decided to take their context away and show only family members and acquaintances. Lola Lasurt’s work is based on this decision and involves the rearrangement of clipped images and keeping gaps of some pictures, as if, at some point, they had fallen or been removed. These painted gaps introduce amnesia in the family story and, somehow, evoke the discontinuity and fragmentation that define the mechanisms of construction of memories.

 

 

Lola Lasurt (Barcelona, 1983) lives and works between Barcelona and Ghent, Belgium. Bachelor of Fine Arts at Universitat de Barcelona, she postgraduated in Aesthetics and Theory of Contemporary Art Pensar l’art d’avui at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and did the Master Produccions Artístiques i Recerca at Universitat de Barcelona. She has been resident in HISK, Ghent (2012-4), La Ene, Buenos Aires (2014), Kunsthuis, Friesland, Holland (2013), Greatmore Art Studios, Cape Town, Southafrica (2012), Eart, Barcelona (2010) and Hangar, Barcelona (2008). Her recent shows include Write of Spring, Het Paviljoen, Ghent, Doble autorització, Fundació Miró, Barcelona, Los Inmutables, DAFO, Lleida, Learn and Teach, Cape Town Art Week, Amnèsies, Espai2, Terrassa, La gran aventura, Can Felipa, Barcelona, El Gegant Menhir, Museu Abelló, Mollet del Vallès, Contextos Intermedia, Tecla Sala, Barcelona, Paradís Perdut, Can Felipa, Barcelona. Nominated for the ‘Young Belgian Art Prize 2015’, she will participate in an exhibition at BOZAR museum, Brussels, in June 2015.

Luis Gordillo

We are pleased to present the exhibition of Luis Gordillo Aproximación-aproximándose, in which we will show recent paintings, drawings and photographs.

 

Luis Gordillo has used and taken support on photography throughout his career, in a functional way first, as a model, and later on in a consciously more creative way, even as a way of searching within the painting.

 

In the seventies, Luis Gordillo used black and white photography with numerous objectives, although the most important one and the one goal that has been maintained over the time is the analysis of the organic elements of painting, neutralizing and objectifying the gesture.

 

The exhibition Aproximación-aproximándose sets a point of expansion of photography in Luis Gordillo’s work, in which the artist seeks to create a space where painting and photography talk and interact.

 

Luis Gordillo is still interested primarily in painting as a body inquiry; however, with the technical intervention of photography he creates a dialectical tension, a growing mental space.

 

 

Luis Gordillo (Sevilla, 1934) lives and works in Madrid. His work has been an artistic reference in the last decades’ pictorical creation. He has exhibited in important museums and institutions, and has received several prizes throughout his career, such as Premio Velázquez a las Artes Plásticas (2007). Among his recent exhibitions stand Luis Gordillo XXL/XXI, Artium, Vitòria; Horizontalia, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Sin título (Provisional), Fundació Suñol, Barcelona, Luis Gordillo – Iceberg total, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, Iceberg Tropical, Luis Gordillo. Antológica 1959-2007, MNCARS, Madrid.

PRESÈNCIA DE GALERIA JOAN PRATS

Galeria Joan Prats opened its doors on March 23rd 1976 with the exhibition Presència de Joan Prats, an homage to one of the most important figures of contemporary avant-garde art of Barcelona, who gave his name to the gallery.

 

 

Today, after 38 years, we say goodbye to our emblematic space in Rambla de Catalunya, so closed to Joan Miró, Joan Prats and Josep Lluís Sert who designed the inside project of the gallery, and we do it with an exhibition that aims to recall the activity of all this time.

 

The last exhibition in Rambla de Catalunya, Presència de Galeria Joan Prats, will therefore be another tribute: to all the artists who have exhibited here and have made this long history possible.

 

In Rambla de Catalunya we will exhibit a wide representation of artists such as: Frederic Amat, Joan Brossa, James Lee Byars, Anthony Caro, Christo, Eduardo Chillida, Max Ernst, Josep Guinovart, Hans Hartung, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Wifredo Lam, Conrad Marca-Relli, Antoni Miralda, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Pablo Palazuelo, Picasso, Joan Ponç, Ràfols Casamada, Ed Ruscha, Sugimoto, Antoni Tàpies, Vieira da Silva, among others.

 

In the space of Balmes street we will show works by Jordi Alcaraz, Alfons Borrell, Fernando Bryce, Hannah Collins, Joaquim Chancho, Enzo Cucchi, Evru, Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Luis Gordillo, Robert Longo, Chema Madoz, Fabian Marcaccio, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Tony Oursler, Caio Reisewitz, Julião Sarmento, José M. Sicilia, Juan Uslé, among others.

 

In the space of Poblenou district we will show large format works, installations, projections, etc. of artists such as Sergi Aguilar, Erick Beltrán, Carles Congost, Muntadas, Aleksandra Mir, Javier Peñafiel, Perejaume,  Fernando Prats, Alejandro Vidal, Eulàlia Valldosera and Zush.

We are pleased to present the third solo exhibition in the gallery of Alejandro Vidal, It is all true even if it never happened, which brings together his most recent works of photography and video.

 

 

The work of Alejandro Vidal places us in a friction zone where almost all is uncertain. The greater part of society protests in front of a computer screen. The dominant networks manage entertainment as a control mechanism. Confusion is generalized and it is unclear which fight befits us.

 

The video Only enemies speak the truth, 2001, proves the necessity of political disorder, of instability; tools for the Individual to bring down the ruling system. Aspects like distrust, suspicion and paranoia are explored in The Potentiality of the worst, 2013. In this video, a bank executive who suffered from psychosis is looking for hidden microphones by means of an electronic detector. Terrified, he attempts to prove that what he thinks is happening to him is real. Vidal uses the images as recorded by the protagonist to plunge us in the culture of suspicion, of surveillance.

 

Critical Heat, 2012, gathers stills that the artist selects of amateur footage ripped from the Internet. In these images, sports cars burn their tires skidding on asphalt. The smoke produced refers us to conflicts, explosions, fires, accidents. Alejandro Vidal aims to redefine the value of image by questioning its hierarchy and loss of innocence, which is derived from its use. On the other hand, the photographs Tension and Release, 2013, show the front windshield of a crashed car where the crystal dust blends in with the rain and humidity, an approach towards a more abstract photography in relation to his previous works.

 

Alejandro Vidal (Palma de Mallorca, 1972) lives and works in Berlin. He has exhibited his work in art centers such as the Museo Experimental El Eco, UNAM Mexico, Bureau for Open Culture, Columbus, Ohio, CAC Málaga, Kunstverein Medienturm Graz, Austria, Participant Inc New York, Kunsthalle Winterthur Switzerland, Fundació La Caixa Barcelona, QUAD in the UK, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, MIS Sao Paulo, Da2 in Salamanca, Kling & Bang Reykjavik, Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena, Mambo in Bologna and the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. He has participated in the Busan Biennale in 2006 and in the Mediations Biennale in Poznan 2012.

We proudly present the exhibition of Fernando Prats Todesfuge, a project that includes works in diverse formats – such as video, installation, photography, paper… – which refer to the poem Todesfuge (Deathfugue) by Paul Celan.

 

 

Paul Celan wrote this poem in 1945, shortly after his return from concentration camp. Published some years later, it had a great repercussion in Germany, where Todesfuge was considered as “a moral lament of art against history”. In the installation, the poet intonates this funeral hymn as if it were truly a musical fugue.

 

For Paul Celan, the task of art consisted in never ceasing to dialogue with the obscure sources. It is this own dialectic spirit, between language and darkness, which attempts to prevail giving sense to the work of Fernando Prats presented in this exhibition. His works, laden with a historical background, are born from an energy set to the limit, represented by smoke as unequivocal materiality. They are works that correlate confronted concepts such as annihilation and harmony, underlining in this way a contradiction that expresses an extreme grief.

 

Fernando Prats constructs this narration from the skies of Auschwitz, from that which occurred during the “Night of broken glass”, the rain, the smoke and the milk as the symbol of maternal nourishment appearing in the image of the “black milk of dawn” (Schwarze Milch der Frühe) with which the poem begins and which grounds the paradox in the matrix of creation.

 

 

Fernando Prats (Santiago de Chile, 1967) has participated in many international exhibitions. He represented Chile in the 54th Biennale di Venezia, 2011; participated in the Mediations Biennale, Poland, 2012; in the second Bienal de Canarias, 2009; the Trienal de Chile, 2009; the Exposición Universal del Agua, Zaragoza, 2008 and has exhibited his work in museums and international art centers such as Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fundació Miró, Barcelona or Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile. In 2007 he received the Grant John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for his trajectory and in 2010 the Prize “Ciutat de Palma Antonio Gelabert d’Arts Visuals”.

Alicia Kopf’s intervention Seal Sounds Under The Floor in Galería Joan Prats owes its context to the project Àrticantartic. The latter deals with the so called “heroic age” of polar expeditions spanning from the late XIX century to the early XX, coinciding with the birth of photography and cinema.

 

The aim of this research is to work from the appropriation and the reshaping of graphical and narrative documents of the polar explorers, turning a historical account into a first person narrative concerning resistance, obsession and the idea of conquest.

 

 

Alicia Kopf presented the individual exhibition “Maneres de (no) entrar a casa“ (ways of (not) entering home) in el Bòlit La Rambla, Girona (2011) and has participated in group shows in CCCB, Barcelona (2013); Fundació Atrium Artis, Les Bernardes, Salt, Girona (2012); Caixaforum, Barcelona, and BIAM (Bienal d’Art d’Amposta), Tarragona (2008), among others. She has received numerous recognitions such as the 2013Art Jove prize awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2013); the Kreas grant for cultural and artistic projects from the Girona City Hall (2011).

We present the exhibition by Muntadas Protocolli Veneziani I.

 

 

Muntadas dedicates his work to projects that serve social or political purposes. He develops his works in two levels: perception and information, where the former acts on an emotive level and the latter stimulates reasoning. In his exhibition, Muntadas observes Venice and draws attention to its forms, which he identifies as Venetian Protocols. Protocols are understood as, citing Angela Vettese, “practical behaviours, repair systems, ritualised technical combinations and habits that materialise in a series of architectural accretions”. Operating from a personal perspective, the artist sheds light upon the dynamics of living in the Lagoon today: protocols that become essential, reinventing themselves and adapting to the passing of time.

 

Protocolli Veneziani I, the first phase of a project on Venice, is composed of a collection of images in which the artist reveals the norms that regulate life in the city, creating a framework in which the inhabitants develop their respective existences. Muntadas considers these rules to be shadows and indispensable reflections of the history of Venice, which materialize in vestiges, traces and signs – aesthetics of a particular architecture.

 

The underlying ambition of the project is to reveal the quotidian side of the city hidden from the eyes of the tourist, deconstructing and dismantling reality, replacing it with fragments or clues. What emerges is an image of a city marked by the paradox of a local culture that has been subjected to a process of internationalization, which inevitably impacts the evolution of its protocols.

 

 

Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) lives and works in New York. He has participated in various international exhibitions, including Documenta Kassel (1977, 1997), Venice Biennale (1972, 1976, 2005), São Paulo Biennale and Lyon Biennale. He has also exhibited in numerous international museums, and given seminars in European and American academic institutions. Muntadas’ work has earned him many awards, including the Velazquez de Artes Plasticas award in 2009.

We present an exhibition on Chema Madoz’s recent work, at Galeria Joan Prats.

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958) won the National Photography Award in 2000. He has exhibited in museums and art centers such as Netherland Photomuseum, Rotterdam, (2011); Hermitage Museum, Kazan, Russia, (2011); Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Santiago de Chile, (2011); Tecla Sala, Barcelona, (2008); CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, (2007); Fundación Telefónica / Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid, (2006); or Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, (1999), among others. He is currently presenting the exhibition Ars Combinatoria in Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera, Barcelona.