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.