Category Archives: 2012

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 His works establish an unpublished and metaphorical relationship with the world through his unique treatment of materials and puns.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).