In the exhibition Latido antecedente ‘Previous Heartbeat’ we present the Works and investigations of Javier Peñafiel carried out in the recent years, mainly between Valparaíso and Berlin.

From his poetic perspective the artist proposes an itinerary through history, retrieving the beats of remarkable characters who opted for critical thinking as a way of struggle and resistance. With long duration Works, such as distancia, miento on the figure of Ruth Berlau (Bertolt Brecht’s companion in love and production) or Locución Merkel-Bachelet a fiction on the possible coincidental encounter of Michelle Bachelet and Angela Merkel in a tram in the DDR in the 70s, Javier Peñafiel extracts and codifies new materials in video, drawn text and photography, disposed in chance meeting operations within the physical space of the gallery.

Intimacy deprived of life. “Our present time is of unprecedented harshness concerning the capacity of some sectors to expropriate the experience of the weakest. It is a scenario of utter confusion and demolition of the collective self-esteem. The Intention of this work in its porous time of lecture is to avoid the instrumentalisation of creativity and life by that machinery of the introversion of fear. They are works against fatality and not something else.”

Javier Peñafiel (Zaragoza, 1964) has exhibited in biennales, institutions and art centers in Europe, Asia and Latin America. His work is included in international private and public collections. He has participated in long-term residency programs in Berlin, Lisbon, NY, São Paulo, Valparaíso, etc. and has more than 14 publications.

Galeria Joan Prats presents Ferran Garcia Sevilla’s exhibition The Theory of Evolution, the Evolution of Theory.

The exhibition gathers a selection of works initiated in the late 60s. The first set represents one of the least known periods of the artist.

The exhibition proposes a gaze to get to know and understand different determinant and significant moments in his trajectory showing us the existing link from his conceptual beginning and the continuity of his underlying values, maintaining a non-formal interrelation through time up to his recent work.

We show the works;

Os 5, 2011, Mixed media on canvas

Os 1, 2011, Mixed media on canvas

Suc, 2010, Mixed media on canvas

Tibo (selection), 1998, Digital print on paper

Imperi 20, 1983, Mixed media on canvas

Respostes 3, 1974, Photocopies

Ombra, 1974, Digital print on paper

Un centre i un altre centre i un altre centre…, 1972, Typescript text on paper

Meridià, cel amb sol, 1971, Photograph, B/W

Accident, 1970, Glass Shelf, broken glasses

Gran Tensió, 1969, Photocopy and thread

Buit, 1967, Eggs and drape

Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Palma 1949, lives in Barcelona. His recent exhibitions have been in IMMA Dublin and Seibu, Tokio. He has also participated in group shows of the collection Helga de Alvear Caceres and Galerie Lelong in Zürich amongst others. He participated in Documenta 8, 1987, and in the XLII Venice Biennale.

His last exhibition in Galeria Joan Prats was in 2007.

Galeria Joan Prats presents Jordi Alcaraz’s exhibition aire corrent, a selection of works of different formats done in 2012.

Ranging from both painting and sculpture’s classic tradition, Jordi Alcaraz reflects on volume, language and time through materials such as water, glass, mirrors, and books.

In his artistic language there is a predomination of visual transgression, glances’ exchange and conjugation of transparencies and emptiness that provide a glimpse of hidden, magical spaces. His works establish an unpublished and metaphorical relationship with the world through his unique treatment of materials and puns.

The will to overcome support’s rigid plane is the most prominent procedure in his works. The work’s surface has a plastic behavior similar to liquids, can be traversed, ruined, impacted, and acquire the consistency of crystal. His approaches question the existence of precise limits, both in terms of gender –painting, sculpture, writing–, and concepts such as indoor-outdoor, reality-representation, evidence-evocation, presence-absence, volume-emptiness, rational-poetic.

In his later works, Jordi Alcaraz deepens in explore, almost obsessively, the artist’s work: drawing, sculpting, painting, focusing on the creative process, and not on the work as the aim of such action.

These paintings and sculptures are explicitly designed not to interact with any preconceived theory, verbalization or specific intent; and they explore the idea that anything once it’s named, it begins to disappear.

The result of it are works in which the absence is more important than the evidence, the absence of almost all, the role of the disappearance of the work, the permanence of the action. We can see the space that is left, the trail of the material used, the trace of its former presence in the surface’s holes, or the color that gets caught in the loop of paper, but the absence of anything else is almost absolute. And sometimes, we don’t even see the material, the trail, the reflection…sometimes it’s just smoke, or the essence of something as fragile as a cloud.

Jordi Alcaraz (*1963), born in Calella, Barcelona, begins his artistic trajectory in sculpture and engraving in the 80s. In recent years he has exhibited in Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), Los Angeles, USA (2011); LACMA, Los Angeles, USA (2011); Museum Der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany (2010); Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2010); Centre d’Art Tecla Sala, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, (2008) or Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2001), among others. His works can be found in collections such as Biedermann Museum, Donaueschingen, Germany; Colección Fontanal Cisneros, Miami or Williams Collection, New York, among others.

In 2013, Jordi Alcaraz will participate in the exhibition ‘Nuage‘ in Musée Rattu de Arles, France.

Ranging from a singular shelf to a combination of shelves, tables and benches that expand into room-size installations, all unique and flexible in size, Aleksandra Mir’s new body of work sits at the intersection between sculpture and furniture. The artist refers to her objects as “comfort pieces for the digital age”, and envisions them placed in otherwise clinical environments, galleries, museums or homes, in co-existence with modern electronic information devices: computers, plasma screens, cell phones, and of course, digital book readers such as Ipads or Kindles.

In 2011, Amazon, the world’s leading bookseller, reported that electronic book sales exceeded those on paper, a widely lamented fact, for what is gained by the efficiency of carrying thousands of titles in a pocket loses the warmth and tactility of a traditional library. Local Library thus marks a moment of nostalgia as we see the book as we have known it since the advent of the printing press in the 15th century vanish. Mir further reverses the book-making process and returns unprocessed paper through to its original state as wood.

In Mir’s Local Library each piece carries the name of an author or literary character. This titling convention is a nod to the artist’s upbringing in Sweden and the ubiquitous IKEA bookshelf ‘BILLY’. In contrast to this mass-produced bookcase the works here are unique and ring with associations to their individual names:

UGO (Volli – b.1942, Italian semiotician)

ASTRID (Lindgren – b.1907, Swedish childrens’ book author)

ERICH (Kästner – b.1899, German childrens’ book author)

EMIL (of Kästner’s stories) & IDA (of Lindgren’s stories)

MERCÈ (Rodoreda – b.1908, Catalan novelist, poet, storyteller and playwright)

GRIMM (Brothers – b.1785/86, German linguists and storytellers of European folk tales)

UMBERTO (Eco – b.1932, Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist)

CHARLOTTE-ROSE (de Caumont de La Force – b.1654, French novelist and poet)

TERENCI (Moix – b.1942, Catalan novelist and essay writer)

RAPUNZEL (of Grimms’ story, an adaptation of Caumont de La Force ‘s Persinette)

MAXIM (Gorky – b.1868, Russian and Soviet author, political activist)

LEO (Tolstoy – b.1828, Russian novelist and playwright)

ANNA (Akhmatova – b.1889, Russian and Soviet modernist poet)

OLGA (Ivanovna Obukhova – b.1941, Russian journalist, Science Fiction writer and translator)

ALLA (Nazimova – b.1879, Russian and US film and theater actress, screenwriter and film producer)

MASHA (Gessen – b.1967, Russian and US journalist, author and political activist)

Because there are nearly 50,000 species of wood in the world with about 200 commercially available, the variety of texture and color of wood is vast. All the woods in Aleksandra Mir’s work carry natural colors: deep greens, purples, yellows and browns which make up the rich spectrum of a painter’s palette. No stain or paint has been used for Mir’s project, only a neutral oil for preservation and enhancement of its natural organic qualities. The first pieces in this exhibition were crafted entirely in 20 species of natural wood, a range that the artist will expand as the work develops. Mir is also interested in considering room-size commissions around the world, to explore a variety of wood trails, to work with reclaimed and recycled woods and to deepen the connections between nature, history and the sense of location in her work.

Local Library can also be perceived as a library for those who can’t or don’t have the ability to read, since the surface, the texture, and color of every single block of wood tells a dramatic story of time and place, worthy of a novel. The colors will also deepen or lighten with age, an organic process depending on light and climate conditions. What you see today is most certainly not what you will get in the future. The process and beauty of aging will come to the foreground as history continues to narrate these works.

Aleksandra Mir (*1967) is a Polish born, Swedish-American Citizen who is currently based in London. She studied Media Arts at the School of Visual Arts and Cultural Anthropology at The New School for Social Research in New York City (1989-1996). She has held solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus, Zurich (2006), Printed Matter, NYC (2007), Mary Boone Gallery, NYC (2007/2008), Saatchi Gallery, London (2008),Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009), The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (2011) and her participation in international group exhibitions include the 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice (2009), Print/OUT, MoMA, NYC (2012), ARTandPRESS, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2012). She is currently preparing a retrospective solo exhibition at the Museum Leuven, Leuven, Belgium (2013) that will cover 15 years of her work on space exploration.

Local Library is the artist’s third solo exhibition with Joan Prats in Barcelona.

We are pleased to announce the first exhibition of Joaquim Chancho in Galeria Joan Prats, in which we present recent work, oil on canvas, large format paintings.

Joaquim Chancho’s trajectory, associated to the abstraction, is defined by an intense study that departs from the silence, the geometry and the natural cycles, and by a work that is always guided by a voluntarily laconic syntax. Hereby, the title of the exhibition, Deixeu-me tancar la finestra, is a reference to a series of previous works of the artist, made during the nineties.

The selection of works of the exhibition is characterized by the use of the iteration and the rhythm. This pictorial work makes the zigzag forms that lead the compositions arise. The artist is left to go for the balance systems that govern the world, creating an intense dialog with the geometry, and focusing on the surface of the picture as pure abstraction. The parallelisms, the repetitions and the changes of rhythm take to the exercise of poetry and give form to new metrics. The chromatic prominence and his interrelationship move these paintings away of severity, and shape a rigorous pictorial language.

Joaquim Chancho (Riudoms, Tarragona, 1943) lives and works between Barcelona and El Pla de Santa Maria, Tarragona. Joaquim Chancho is an emeritus professor of Facultat de Belles Arts de la Universitat de Barcelona. Among other museums and art centers, he has exhibited his works in MACBA, Barcelona; National Museum of Contemporary Art of Korea, Seul; Fundació Suñol, Barcelona; Foundation Maeght, Saint Paul de Vence, France; Art Center Berlin Friedrichstrasse, Berlin; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico.

We are pleased to announce the exhibition of Hannah Collins, Begin Anywhere (John Cage), in which we present recent work, photographs and video.

The selection of photographs that constitute the exhibition reflects the artist’s interest in Modernism and its journey through the 20th Century, and it’s based on atelier Brancusi, which was given to Paris with the condition that the internal relationships remained the same as they had been in his lifetime. Brancusi’s journey to Paris, his own images of his work and his objects and unfinished works are all placed as if he had just momentarily left the space and yet the context is the space of an architect whose trajectory contains many buildings still now in production.

These images have been juxtaposed with a time-lapse film made in Northern France in an abandoned textile factory – the factory was also at the height of its production during the years of the 20th Century and not so far from Paris on the map. Against the slowly changing backdrop of a 24 hour time lapse film shot in the crumbling interior of the La Tossée factory over two nights and days the residents of Roubaix re-live their dreams. The dreamers all have a connection to Algeria and the dreams often travel to places unavailable in everyday life -whilst one man finds himself flying over his home in Algeria another dreamer becomes the President of France able to alter and change the country at will. The dreams of others are released from their private night-time place whilst the abandoned and neglected factory is made visible. As night slowly turns to day sound guides us through our reactions of slowly changing time where the only action is sound.

Hannah Collins (London, 1956) lives and works in London and Barcelona. Among other museums and art centers, she has exhibited her work in Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo UNAL, Bogota; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Viena; MUDAM Luxembourg; Fundación La Caixa, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; Seoul Museum of Art; La Laboral, Gijón; Artium, Vitoria; VOX image contemporaine, Montreal; CAC, Malaga. She is currently presenting her project ‘The Fragile Feast’ simultaneously in Deutsche Bank 60 Wall Gallery, New York; and Fundación Valentin Madariaga, Sevilla. In addition, she participates in some exhibitions such as ‘Singulier (s)/Pluriel’, LaM, Lille; ‘Midnight Party’, Walker Art Center Minneapolis; and ‘Le Grand Atelier’, Musée des arts contemporaines – Site du Grand-Hornu, Belgium. Hannah Collins exhibits in Galeria Joan Prats since 1992.

We are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Barcelona of Enrique Martínez Celaya, El cielo de invierno, in which we present recent work of the artist, large format paintings and watercolors.

The selection of works that constitute the exhibition relate to an imaginary linked to nature and the elements; cold, ice, snow and also fire coexist with the human presence which in turn, makes its appearance in the landscape. Images of calm and purity, or burnt landscapes that reveal the underlying unsteadiness, figures of a boy travel around the works, through his gaze he manages to reconstruct the representation of the phenomena and the mysteries of nature.

Enrique Martínez Celaya defines himself as a painter even though he has works on sculpture, photography, writing and also video. His approach to painting attempts to restore, through the scientific practice, his relation to observation, experience, conscience and the cognitive processes. The painting of Enrique Martínez Celaya isn’t figurative in the conventional sense, for from it a dialogue between what painting represents and the physical reality of painting in itself is generated.

Enrique Martínez Celaya (Palos, Cuba, 1964) lives and works in Delray Beach, Florida and Los Angeles, California. He has exhibited in museums and international centers, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Berliner Philharmonie Berlin, Museum of Biblical Art New York, Fundación Canal Madrid, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, Emory Visual Arts Gallery Atlanta, The Rubin Museum of Art  New York, Loyola University Museum of Art Chicago, Fowler Museum at UCLA Los Angeles, Miami Art Museum, Boca Raton Museum of Art Florida, Oakland Museum of California, Brauer Museum of Art Valparaiso University, Indiana. Among his projects we point out  The Master, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia (2012).

Exhibition organized by Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán

Also participating, Christoph Keller, Raphaël Zarka, Paloma Polo, Bernardo Ortiz, Efrén Álvarez, Meris Angioletti, Jose Antonio Vega Macotela, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Jorge Aviña and Florian Göttke

Modelling Standard is a project of long trajectory that starts from a mutual interest for historiography’s investigation methods common in micro-history, set out in Italy during the early seventies by a group of social scientists. The text: Huellas. Raíces de un paradigma indiciario written by Carlo Ginzburg published in 1978 has worked as a pillar to this investigation. In it Ginzburg breaks down 3 fundamental elements in the writing of history taking into account, in the most possible direct way, the versions of the subordinate classes:

– The search for clues, symptoms and fragmentary witnesses.

– The reduction of scale.

– The exhaustive analysis of sources.

The title is a reference to the concept of the Standard Model which is used in the field of physics to explain the almost invisible interactions which occur on a subatomic level in matter. With this analogy, far from pretending to establish relationships between fields of knowledge apparently dissimilar, our intention is to detect and understand those fragile connections which already exist and always have existed.

The result of this first stage of Modelling Standard consists in a network of caricatures and texts in which a series of famous characters become victims and killers of a great irresoluble crime. Among them, Sigmund Freud, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Morelli, Fantomas, Aby Warburg, Francis Galton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Roussel and Joe Orton.

For the presentation in the Galeria Joan Prats, we show for the first time the work on the whole, with the contribution of artists, illustrators and guest investigators, whose personal investigators work as new links of this chain which grows longer and longer… like devil’s dribble.

Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán, 2011

We are pleased to announce the upcoming opening of the exhibition by Juan Uslé Landropo and Zebulón, with which we will open the season on September 22nd.

Ten years after his previous exhibition in the gallery, we present a selection of his most recent medium and large format paintings.

Juan Uslé, in his recent work, as in the last twenty years, has been characterized by the rigorous commitment that constitutes a personal theory of vision that evolves through its own codes with a formally abstract language.

We will have the presence of the artist who lives and works between Saro (Cantabria) and New York.

The exhibition links diverse attempts to chart the common territory while facing entropy.

The exhibit presents for the first time in the gallery a connection between the works of Aleksandra Mir, Knut Åsdam, Perejaume, Carla Zaccagnini and Alejandro Vidal.

The dynamics of the pieces lies around the new maps of old territories from which in an uneven but also complementary way, scenes realized from an apparent recreational posture, in turn reveal a plot of conflict are set out.

Carla Zaccagnini’s video spins around the non identity of the territory, that which is inhabited by its own absence.

In Knut Åsdam’s photographies, the impossibility of communication becomes evident through the tension zones and the sentences that prevent an outcome.

In the work of Aleksandra Mir, direction and position from the non place manifests its own process, the digital representational surface alters the form of perception in the work of Perejaume, and thus also in the occult, that which threatens us and the photosensitive images of Alejandro Vidal.

Aleksandra Mir, Lubin, Poland, 1967. She lives and works in London. She has participated in the 53 Biennale di Venezia in 2009. She has exhibited in international centers such as The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Kunstpalais Erlangen, Germany, Fundacion Jumex, Mexico, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, The Vera List Center, New York, Printed Matter Inc., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, ICA, London, Kunsthaus, Zurich.

Knut Åsdam, Trondheim, Norway, 1968. He lives and works in Oslo. In 2011 he presented Abyss and Tripoli in Tate Modern London. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bergen in 2010, Manifesta 7 in 2008, 50 Biennale di Venezia in 2004, and 8 Istanbul Biennial in 2003. He has shown, among many others, at Sørlandets Art Museum of Kristiansand, Norway, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, National Gallery of Art in Washington, New York MOMA/PS1, FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon.

In Remarks on Colour 2, we present the new exhibition by Julião Sarmento, introducing his latest work, canvases, collages and photography.

Julião Sarmento has developed a visual discourse that looks into memory and transgression, seduction and desire. The richness and complexity of his work lies in a system of free signifiers   travelling through the works and across his own limits. The use of regular patterns such as the expression of the hands, the body language and architectural floor plans achieves a free-play of associations that avoids to settle into a meaning.

The exhibition takes its name from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work Remarks on Colour, who affirms ‘‘There is no phenomenology but there are indeed phenomenological problems’’, and focuses on the analysis of mechanisms of sensory perception of colour.

In the canvases, the white surfaces of the paintings and the partially erased forms, appreciable in the work of Julião Sarmento, coexist with the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. Silkscreened photographic images leave the dominating white empty and highly charged simultaneously. The collages make allowance for some philosophical notes mixed with silkscreened images of Modernist houses in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, and unrelated photographic images.

The conception of these contrastive components, deliberately artificial and controlled, making resistance against the coherent narrative, conceding to the viewer the freedom of interpretation.

Charged with suggestion and incertitude, the current work of Julião Sarmento deals in the impossibility of truly comprehension of Experience.

Julião Sarmento was born in Lisbon, in 1948. Lives and Works in Estoril, Portugal. Hi has shown his own work in art centres as CAC Málaga; The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (2011); Tate Modern, London (2010-2011); Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2009); Centro José Guerrero, Granada (2008); Fundación Botín, Santander and MEIAC, Badajoz (2006); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2005); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2004). Currently, his work can be seen in La Casa Encendida, Madrid and soon in Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Mallorca.

In agua que cai, the second exhibition of Caio Reisewitz in the gallery, we present his most recent work; large scale photographs and a series of photomontages.

By means of photography, Caio Reisewitz approaches different subject matters, such as the representation of natural spaces and the repercussion of aggressions and disasters in nature. His large scale photographs deal with landscape redefining aerial perspective and inviting to reflect through a critical gaze.

The works by Caio Reisewitz that we present seek to capture the greatness of the natural reserves while evidencing the immensurable abyss between man and his object of perception. The spaces taken by Caio Reisewitz show us the progressive wearing of nature as a result of human action. Images in his work, in their soberness, pretend to generate complicity and to introduce the spectator in their physical space as a contemplating subject.  

Caio Reisewitz was born in São Paulo, in 1967. He lives and works in São Paulo. He has participated in the Nanking Biennale, China (2010), in la Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia, Argentina (2009 y 2007), in the 51 Venice Biennale (2005), and the 26 São Paulo Biennale (2004). He has exhibited his work in art centers such as MUSAC León, Museu Nacional de Brasilia,  Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza in Vigo, Rac Foundation in Pontevedra, National Gallery Cape Town, South Africa, Pinacoteca of Bologna, Italy, Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, CAAC Seville, Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid and MARCO in Vigo.

We present the exhibition Megan: Variant Paintants, recent work by Fabian Marcaccio

Through a picture taken by paparazzi of actress Megan Fox, Fabian Marcaccio has committed himself to a project that makes him treat painting, drawing, sculpture and even digital animation, taking as a result the eight Variants shown in the exhibition. Every work implies a totally different approach to the same subject, approach somewhat opposed at times to the starting image.

Fabian Marcaccio reflects on painting from the traditional limits working with different media, daring to introduce, for example, digital techniques to his painterly practice. The content of his works may seem improper within painting. Some of them may even assume an adequate scale for installation or to turn three-dimensional. His paintings face the unitary, using multiple parts and details that never create a strong whole. In this way, Fabian Marcaccio considers how to compose with diverse materials and techniques a work that proposes a vision on the contemporary pictorial realm.

Fabian Marcaccio was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1963. He lives and works in New York. He has exhibited his work in art centres all over the world, such as MOMA PS1 Contemporary Art of New York, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, FRAC Auvergne, MALBA Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Miami Art Museum, Cologne Kunstverein, Neues Museum of Nuremberg. He has also participated in the 11 Documenta of Kassel, 8 Bienal de la Habana, and 7 International Biennale Istanbul.

We present Cabello/Carceller’s show titled Archive: Drag Models, a photographical work that emerges from the need to analyze the influence of film models in the birth of different aesthetics in the collective imaginary, exploring the possibility of modifying mainstream discourses, acting from micropolitics.

In the narrative cinema, the one that is most widely watched, the screen acts like a mirror, simultaneously feeding the illusion of a dream. The ability of viewers for virtual immersion in alien stories is also the key that raises often unexpected identification processes, despite conventions and laws that govern social relationships.

Archive: Drag Models is presented as a gallery of portraits produced in several countries, through which are tracked the traces of film influence on the representation of alternative masculinities. Reassign and relocate masculinity encourage us to go beyond the deconstruction of existing power structures, in an essay to move masculinity away from prevailing masculinism. This project develops a collective portrait that shows the preferences in the selection of aesthetic and behaviour models of the women who have chosen to rethink and/or transgress the limited supply of gender assignment. These secondary stories allow us to discover identity roles that have been refuted for too a long time and stigmatised from the point of view of hegemonic aesthetics.

Along the project, the relationships between reality and fiction are intensified by the contrast between real circumstances and fictional spaces. The portraits are contextualized with images taken in the cities or places where different participants were or live when portrayed. The sceneries and the persons melt with the characters and the sets, questioning the archive as a perfect tool for regulation and taxonomy, and emphasizing an idea of chaotic categorization in the presentation of the project.

Helena Cabello was born in Paris in 1963; Ana Carceller was born in Madrid in 1964. They both work and live in Madrid. They have shown their works in important museums and art centres all over the world, including Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Le Magasin – CNAC in Grenoble, France, Bucharest Biennale 4, Romania in 2010; Stenersenmuseet, Oslo, CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, MNCARS, Madrid, Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, in 2009; KulturHuset Stockholm, Haus der Kultur der Welt, Berlin, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz in 2008; Casino Luxembourg,   Centre d’art Santa Monica, Barcelona, Brooklyn Museum New York in 2007; Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, Germany, Kunsthaus Basselland, Basel in 2006; Centre d’art la Panera, Lleida, Museo del Barrio, New York, Domus Artium 2, Salamanca, CaixaForum, Barcelona, in 2004, and Centro Cultural la Diputación de Málaga in 2002.

We present Eulàlia Valldosera’s exhibition Dependència mutual in which, through different supports, video, photography, documentary, light installation, the acts of cleaning and erasing are the central theme, renewing once again her declaration on the relationships of power through objects and our dependency to them.

In the performance that gives name to the video Dependència mútua and to a series of photographs;      Eulàlia Valldosera isn’t in the action but behind the camera. By request of the artist a Ukrainian origin cleaning lady is about to clean a statue of a roman emperor. The film was recorded in the Naples Archaeological museum, where the great marble statue of Emperor Claudius represents not only a treasure of the past, but also a weight for the Italian culture’s present. As she touches and cleans the male figure on a dominating pose, the woman challenges the dark and intangible dimensions of the symbols of power. Through this metaphoric action, the artist questions the relationship between the hegemonic and subordinate roles. She questions if the contraposition between the powerful and the subordinate – between male and female – is present in the deepest coats of our unconscious and considers the reciprocal dependency relationship according to which each role requires of the other to justify its own existence.

Liuba, a documentary in which the main character is a woman named Liuba, born in Chernobyl, ‘‘tells us who she is and how she has managed to place herself along many women in a precarious work entangle. Who carries the cleaning tasks in private and public spaces of each country? Where do they come from? ’’*

In the last room, a mirror, that rotates incessantly, ‘‘projects the images of one hand cleaning, following the movement of the cloth; and of a book, literally flying around the walls’’*. The exhibition space becomes a screen and, at the same time, a container; with this ironic gesture, the art gallery becomes the object of the exhibition. ‘‘The projected objects, on the other hand, sum up the dual tension present in the rest of the works in the exhibition, in the way of an epilogue’’*.

Eulàlia Valldosera was born in 1963 in Vilafranca del Penedès, and she lives and works in Barcelona. She has exhibited her works in important museums and art centres all over the world, including the Reina Sofía in Madrid 2009, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the PS1 MOMA in New York, the Antoni Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona in 2001 and the Center for Contemporany Art in Rotterdam 2000. Likewise, in the Sidney Biennale (1996), the Johannesburg Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale and the Projeckts Skulptur in Münster (1997),  the Biennale di Venezia (2001), the Sao Paulo Biennale (2004), the Biennale de Lyon (2009) and most recently in the Casino Luxembourg (2010).

Hans-Jörg Mayer, born in 1955, takes us in a trip to cruel and happy clowns, blue bean babies, black and white soldiers of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vague waves and tender horizons – all his pieces are bittersweet odes to life, treating neglect, extreme hysteria and his gestures endanger at the same time – repeatedly. The meanest maledictions lead to the most beautiful reconciliation drawings. It’s life, not easy nor comfortable, never, but always true.

Carsten Fock, born in 1968, is into the thematic of religion, the transcendental, even an inner eye, or perhaps a third eye. He is located without doubt between Christian iconography and outsider art, forgetting romanticisms and expecting to extreme expressivity and anger; raw anger with his hypnotic search still astonished. His dialogue daily confronts history of art, especially with german stand. Fock is a sea of questions that search for a mouthful of air, Fock has an irritating calm and avoids answers that don’t solve anything, telling nothing.

Tjorg Douglas Beer, born in 1973, his anarchic vocabulary is belligerent and denounces the media exaggerations and the political and social structures. He will never adopt a moralist tone; one must try to concentrate in the silence while contemplating his work, in spite of the visual cacophony. It is attractive and offensive at the same time. It seems desire but it’s pain …however, we must dare to enter in this unpleasant labyrinth.

Marc Brandenburg, born in 1965, observes attentively the frivolous aspect of the art world, frivolity that serves him as a metaphor on the racist and sexist tendencies of the occidental high-classes. His thematic is inspired on nightlife, as night erases the differences on the colour of the skin or what some call race. These night raid allow him to breathe freely and to stop thinking of the differences devised by men. These incursions at night have permitted him to find his main characters, people at the limit of society, whose neo-humanistic ideas have made them leave rigid and conservative schemes behind. Being different doesn’t mean being a victim – and his drawings seem to state it very clearly.

We are pleased to announce Fernando Bryce’s second exhibition in Galeria Joan Prats.

At the end of the nineties, Fernando Bryce started developing a project based on the copy, ink on paper, of series consisting of photography, press cuts, adverts, promotional propaganda…, to begin with the intention of proposing an exercise about history of power and the images of his country of origin, Perú. Very soon, the archaeological investigation on documents extended to moments and determining historical characters of the XXth century, with a double intention; on the one hand, to rescue from the past documents and images expressly forgotten by official history, and on the other, to freeze in the present those destined to be rapidly forgotten by the structure of power in media.

For his second exhibition in the gallery we present his recent work L’Humanité, focused on the 1930 decade. This series is composed of 47 drawings that reproduce images of international press headlines of this period, noted for the raise of authoritarian regimes in Europe, a strong international economical crisis and the ascending violence that would lead to World War II. It also includes images from cinematographic posters, with its characteristic sensationalist emphasis. The exhibition is closed with the piece The World Over/1929, consisting of 4 drawings of world maps from an American magazine. His work demonstrates the construction of the news, the representation of power and the imaginarium of a time, proposing a new view about history and discovering the univocal discourses of the ruling powers.  

Fernando Bryce (Lima, 1965) presently lives and works in Ghent. Among his recent projects and exhibitions: An approach to the Museo Hawai, Museum Het Domien, Sittart (The Netherlands, 2009), The Fear Society, Pabellón de la Urgencia in the 53 Venice Biennale (2009), 10 Bienal de La Habana (2009), 28 Sao Paulo Biennial (2008), Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007), Poetics of Handmade, MOCA, Los Angeles (2007), Taking Time/Tiempo al Tiempo, MARCO, Vigo (2007), Out of Time: A Contemporary View, MOMA, New York (2006-07), Drawings, Kunstverein Stuttgart (2006), Whitney Biennale, Whitney Museum, New York (2006), Monuments for the USA, White Columns, New York (2005-06) and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2005), Fernando Bryce, Fundació Tápies, Barcelona (2005), Tropical Abstraction, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2005), Alemania/Walter Benjamin, Raum für Aktuelle Kunst, Kunstmuseum Luzern (Switzerland, 2003), Turismo/El Dorado – Alemania 98, Künsterhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2002). Currently he is participating in the Line Line Linea exhibition in Kunstmuseum Bonn.

Adult Contemporary is the first individual exhibition of Carles Congost in Barcelona since 2005.

Adult Contemporary consists of a collection of recent work that combines different supports such as photography, object, drawings and music with the intention of placing a series of reflexions about human relationships on the scene, that include references to family, social background and our intimate beliefs. To realize some of the new proposals, the artist uses the romantic photo-novel format, reaffirming his interest for narrative aspects in the use of images. In these works, presented as large scale magazine or comic-book pages, the artist claims the validity of the format that becomes a tool with enormous plastic and expressive potential.

Carles Congost (Olot, Girona, 1970) lives and works in Barcelona. His work has been shown in multiple exhibitions, such as Say I’m your number one in the MUSAC in Leon (2007), Memorias de Arkaran in the CAC in Malaga (2006), Un mystique determinado in the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela (2005), That’s my impresión! in the CAAC of Seville (2002), Popcorn Love in the MNCARS in Madrid (2001) or Country Girls in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2000). He has also participated in numerous collective exhibitions in the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle of Budapest, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt of Berlin, the Centre Pompidou of Paris, the MIGROS in Zurich, the MAMBA of Buenos Aires, the Palais Tokyo of Paris, the PS1 Contemporary Art Center of New York or the Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. Currently he participates in Yo Uso Perfume Para Ocupar Más Espacio, an exhibition in the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México DF.

Aleksandra Mir presents a series of collages that combine religious iconography with that of space travel. “If angels and astronauts share the same sky”, she asks, “Isn’t it time they were introduced?”

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Infinite space within an infinite nothingness. Undefinable spirit within unlimited thought. Icons and insaciable quests. Human curiosity has a need for a context within which to exist. Religion was science as science is now religion. The justification of our lust and thrust for the infinite, away from our sensory paradise, comparable to the search for the deepest recesses of our minds, are both ways of seeking the answers to creation, purpose and demise. Religion, as a system of control, has come close to its great rival throughout history – the laws of physics that govern our universe. ‘When will miracles cease?’ – The modes of technology that we produce are ingenious to the children of earth but woefully inadequate adaptations of our unlimited imagination. ‘Why are we here?’ – Spiritual answers are equally unsatisfactory compared to the power of such simple questions. The answer may lie in convergence. Technology may have to wait for the power of the human brain to fully develop its (super)natural abilities. Will the technologies that are then produced be miraculous in that they may not require material substance to work but a faith, a belief in laws of physics to subtle than matter itself cannot withstand their logic? Will they be based in technology so discreet that it will be indistinguishable from the very fabric of the universe and all that is created within it? When we look at science and religion, are we looking at the same technology at different levels of evolution? Is humankind always to be polarised and thus paralysed?

Mark Baker

Aleksandra Mir was born in Lubin, Poland, in 1967. She has been showing on international exhibitions, among many others, at 53th Biennale of Venezia; as well as in Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Kunsthaus Zurich, Institute of Contemporary Art London, SMAK Ghent, PS1/MOMA New York, Whitney Biennial New York.

The exhibition “the long gaze the short gaze” is a look around the political space and the limits of subjectivity. Through three video projections and a series of photographs Åsdam analyzes of the relationship of the person and the environment, linking this issue with issues of disagreement.

Four categories are essential to Åsdam’s work; Speech, Living, Sexualities and Struggle. Speech is often theatrical and poetically displaced in Åsdam’s film, video and audio works, and point out how subjectivity is formed through speech acts — either through actual speech or through other forms of self-articulation like clothing, gestures and routines. Many of his works express an interest for the performative aspects of speech and for how meaning is temporarily stabilized through repetition, inscription and reinscription. The category of Living is descriptive of the integration of architecture, place and social dynamics, for instance how a park functions within a city, or, how our everyday lives are conditioned by rapid economic and political changes. The works also display a strong interest for the interplay of fantasy and narration in everyday experience of the environment. Sexualities refers to the plurality of sexual and gendered experience, fundamental for Åsdam`s construction of characters. His work witnesses a sensitivity to the instability of the self that expands on the merits of queer theory and feminism, and simultaneously invites the viewers own desires and presuppositions in the building of narrative and desire. Struggle is vital, not only in a political sense, but also as a way of understanding the contestation and affirmation of ‘speech’ (subject formation), ‘living’ (the meaning of the everyday) and ‘sexualities’ (the meaning of our bodies) in our everyday, involving both psychological and social processes.

Knut Åsdam was born in Trondheim, Norway in 1968 and he lives and works in Oslo. He has been showing on the international art scene for the last ten years. He represented Norway in the 50 Venice Biennale, participated in the 8 Istanbul Biennale, the 1st Melbourne International Biennale and in Manifesta 7, Italy. He has shown, among many others, at Tate Britain, the Kunsthalle Bern, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, the Moderna Museet, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the MOMA/PS1, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and in FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon. Articles related to his work have been published in Artforum, Grey Room, Le Monde Diplomatique, Untitled Magazine, amongst others.

Upcoming projects and exhibitions 2009

Walter & Mc Bean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, USA

Tate Modern, UK

Galeria Joan Prats presents the exhibition “1992 – 2008” by Albert Rafols Casamada, with a selection of works that bear witness to the constant activity of this painter in the last 16 years and to put as one of the most representative painters of Spanish contemporary art with his genuine and poetic way of abstraction.

Through his carrer, Ràfols Casamada has been recognized with the Premio Nacional de las Artes Plásticas del Ministerio de Cultura de España, in 1980, and the Premi Nacional d’Arts Visuals de la Generalitat de Catalunya, en 2003, among other awards. Also MACBA in 2001 organized an extensive retrospective of his work.

The exhibition “Serie Calculum, Calculum Series” is an essay about the concentration, the density and the creation of value in contemporary society through a group of objects and a series of maps and diagrams.

It’s a collection of elements of small format that as trace, point out and condense a social, political or economic problem and at the same time they present themselves as knots in a net or circuit that reveal a system or mechanism of construction on the concept of idea or ‘’value’’.

This project is related with the ‘’wunderkammern’’ or cabinet of wonders, where particular findings, artistic works, scientific discoveries were received under a unique category: that one of the wonder and surprise.

These collections were at a time group of objects and their systematization. It was the evidence and the micro-checking of the theories about the functioning of the world that were generated.

How is it that an object acquires a special value facing another and this value modifies other objects? How can this value imply a speculation and an added value, this manoeuvre to be the meaning and the object it’s significant? How is it that the production builds this value and that the transport of objects and their reintegration modify this categorization of objects? How can a collection be systematized and how are collections of objects formed? How do we select things of the world?

‘’Calculus’’ is translated as stone in latin and a ‘’calculum’’ is interpreted as a stone in a shoe. The calculations are speculations or projections according to a tendency but at the same time an intersection of forces and epistemological sedimentation. In such way the exhibition presents a display of drawings, photographs, maps, objects, newspaper bits as small problems that were found by chance in travelling through different places like Brazil, Korea, China, Mexico, Colombia and Spain and are evidences of problems of categories or value in each context and at the same time entries to a much more complex definition of what is selection and concentration.

During his artistic trajectory, Biennale of Sao Paulo, Biennale of Lyon, Site Santa Fe, amongst others, he has distinguished himself for using unorthodox formats such as the multiple, the ‘piece-book’ and experiments that try to link public art with graphic languages.

In his work he analyzes and dissects the powers that communicate the different graphic means in their distribution of information, and also of attitudes and values.

While it is true that Alejandro Vidal explicitly presents a certain aestheticism of violence, evoking close-up the non-victimised faces of fragility, starting from the grounds provided by awareness of the human condition we discover mythical and aural characters, the warriors of an epic limit who hurl themselves into the depths of experience, baring their teeth at fear.

We may conclude therefore that the strength and sensuality of the images in the present selection of works encompass a great representation of intensity. Gospel truth, shamanic ecstasies and hidden pleasures. Alejandro Vidal presents a set of epiphanic tales, of encounters with our brutal selves.

Alejandro Vidal has had recent solo exhibitions at Kling & Bang Gallerie in Reykjavik, Galerie Adler in New York and Frankfurt, MOT in London, Play Platform for Film & Video in Berlin, Fundació ”la Caixa”, Caixaforum in Barcelona (Espai Montcada), Galleria Artra  in Milan, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. His work has also been included in recent group exhibitions like Time Code at the MAMbo, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Aggression at the  Kunsthalle Winterthur in Switzerland, System Error at the Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena, Italy, Repeat All at the Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile, Busan Biennale in Korea, Youth of Today at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Crime and Punishment at the Tallinn Kunstihoone in Estonia, Naked Life at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan, and Personne n’est innocent at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France.

The artist will be present before the opening and during the vernissage. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue. For more information, please contact us at the gallery.

This work, produced in digital print and configured for the gallery space, focuses on  a series of questions  on the meaning, process, development and completion of a project, resulting in an overlay of different levels of reading.

2007  Muntadas/BS. AS. Centro Cultural  Recoleta, Sala Cronopios, Buenos Aires, Argentina / Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires, Argentina. / Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires, Argentina.2006 Protokolle, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany. 2005  Muntadas   On Translation: I Giardini, Spanish Pavilion , 51 Venice Biennale – On Translation: Fear/miedo.  InSite.  Tijuana (MX),San Diego (USA). 2004   Muntadas Projekte (1974- 2004) .On Translation: Erinnerungräume / On Translation : Museum Neue Museum Weserburg Bremen, Bremen. Germany. 2003  Das Museum Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund.    2002 On translation: Museum Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona.  2000   Warning , Attitudes Musée d’Art et d’Histoire / Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland. 1999   On Translation :The Audience Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rótterdam. 1998  On Translation: Proyectos, Fundación Telefónica de Arte y Tecnología Madrid.-  The Monuments, Museum of Contemporary Art, Ludwing Museum, Budapest.  Documenta X, Kassel.

Galeria Joan Prats is pleased to present the first solo show in Spain of New York-based artist Lydia Dona. This exhibition, titled “The Engulfments of Change,” presents Dona’s newest paintings, as well as a selection of recent works on paper. Influenced by cinema, particularly film noir, these compositions embody a dramatic exploration, analysis, and synthesis of the urban labyrinth. In them, a clash ensues between the world and abstraction, which presents the viewer with the complexities of the changing models of technology and its relationship to the physical.

Diagrams derived from car repair manuals become metaphors of the increasing hybridization of the mechanical and the organic. Rendered in outlines, these “bodies” literally absorb into their skins the environment that surrounds them. The environment of glossy pools and contrasting light and shadow create glowing transparencies and dramatic flexibilities, bringing out the abstract-loaded models with energies of another nature. Like a modern alchemist, Dona transmits the landscape into the corporal, creating a new visual model. As critic Raphael Rubinstein writes in the exhibition catalogue, “One wonders how she is able to accommodate so many diverse elements, so many historical threads, so many different modes of abstraction into a single composition. What ultimately holds them together is the light that pervades and emanates from the paintings. It’s a distinctly artificial illumination, somewhere between a Flavinesque florescence and the radioactive glow given off by medical and scientific devices.”

Lydia Dona lives and works in New York City. Well known both nationally and internationally, Dona’s work has been featured in important museum exhibitions such as the 1991 Corcoran Biennial in Washington D.C., and From Albers to Paik, Works from the Daimler Chrysler Collection, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in 1999. Recent group shows include Officina America at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy, in 2002, and About Painting at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York, in 2004. Between 1995 and 1997, a survey show of her work from 1989 – 1995 traveled in the United States and Canada. Lydia Dona’s work is included in numerous significant collections, both public and private.