Category Archives: 2014

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.