Category Archives: 2019

Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Opening: 10.10.2019,  7pm

 

Friday October 11, 6.30pm, talk between Juan Uslé and curator Javier Sánchez Martínez

 

The title of the new exhibition by Juan Uslé in Galeria Joan Prats, ‘Unsettled’ alludes metaphorically to painting, the central subject of his entire work.

“Unsettled” means unstable, but also variable, restless, something that includes opposites, or a paradox. In Uslé’s paintings, the stripes of color fluctuate, they do not have a definite beginning and end, and refer to the passage of time, the hours, the seasons, the changing landscapes, such as Bernia, a mountain range located in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula, a place of inspiration for Uslé, among many others.

 

Juan Uslé’s work reflects on the possibilities of painting. In his words: “Speaking of painting, I would also talk about his tremor, his ‘no fixation’, his journey or, even better, what we understand as displacement.”

 

Formed by repeated strokes, although never identical, his work is characterized by movement and rhythm, and invoke the surrounding environment, and, at the same time, the energy of the body’s drives. Uslé creates a pictorial language where formal or metalinguistic aspects are mixed with his life experience, in addition to allusions to time and the creation process itself. According to Juan Uslé: “Time is what we have left. I conceive it as a horizontal surface where past and future moments are deposited and transfigured. Many of my small works seem to go on, spread in space. They suggest a “landscape” –let’s call it this way- or space of multiple juxtaposed horizons.”

 

In the exhibition, Uslé presents small formats, which create a close and intimate relationship together with large-scale works, the largest dimension he has worked with and which he started in 2017. Small works are organized into families, and speak of repetition, but also individually contain their own identity.

 

The exhibition is completed with two large format photographs. They make allusions to the painting and invoke the recollection and emotion of the discovery.

Like his paintings, they question our ability to see, think, perceive and feel.

Annika Kahrs

Opening: 14.11.2019 from 18 to 21h

Exhibition: 20 and 21.11.2019 from 11 a 20h and till 30.11.2019 by appointment (t. 932160290 o galeria@galeriajoanprats.com)

Venue: Joan Prats Warehouse. Passatge Saladrigas, 5 Barcelona. Metro Poblenou

 

 

With motive of the Loop Festival, we present in our venue Joan Prats Warehouse a selection of recent videos and a sound installation by our artists Alicia Kopf, Annika Kahrs and Teresa Solar which link stories or personal reflections with the space exploration, technology and science.

 

The exhibition title, 26 thousand light years, refers to the distance that separates us from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a supermassive black hole located in the center of the Milky Way, the observation of which seems to confirm that black holes grow by absorbing minor ones and stars. The scientific speculation towards the outer space often approaches science fiction, as it appears in the works we present.

 

Alicia Kopf’s video Speculative Intimacy: An Understanding Of Control, 2019, suggests an emotional science fiction perspective in order to originate new stories about the interaction between bodies, human and non-human. The movie takes place in a near future where the borders between public and private have disappeared, the lives pass in continuous exposition. Michelle, its main character, investigates a concept in crisis: ¿What is intimacy? and talks about this topic with his non-human partner.

 

Annika Kahrs presents two works. The video solid surface, with hills, valleys, craters and other topographic features, primarily made of ice, 2014, shows a planetary where a starry sky is projected, at the center of which appears a circular light which would appear to be the moon, but it turns out to be a focus. In this work from 2014, the artist uses picture and narrative to make a portrait of Pluto, the vision of which was about to change, since New Horizons, an unmanned mission from NASA, was headed to its orbit. Finally it overflied it on July 14th, 2015, and could, for the first time, photograph it closely. Until then, the scientific illustrations about the planet were based on speculation.

 

The other work by Annika Kahrs is the sound installation think about two black holes colliding, then brush your teeth and go to bed, 2019. This work in two parts is a sound installation exploring gravitational waves and their detection. In 2015, the first direct observation of gravitational waves was announced by LIGO. This moment was a record of the collision of two black holes. In the first part of her installation, using a toothbrush as an instrument Kahrs has recreated the sound of their detection alongside audio data courtesy LIGO. For the second part, Kahrs has recorded interviews between Dr. Keith Thorne of LIGO and contributors from different fields.

 

In Teresa Solar’s video Ground Control, 2017, the artist transforms herself 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. The title Ground Control has a double meaning: it is a direct reference to the material, ground or clay, and the pressure exerted on it when working on the potter’s wheel and it also refers to the operations center from which the development of a spaceship is monitored. Through the title, this minimal communication experience and conflictual balance between subject and subject matter increases in scale, linking with space travel.

 

 

Alicia Kopf (Girona, 1982) lives and works in Barcelona. Her work 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). Recently, she has exhibited 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.

 

 

Annika Kahrs (Achim, Germany, 1984) lives and works in Hamburg. She has been awarded a number of prizes and scholarships including the Max-Pechstein-Förderpreis–Stipendium, of Zwickau, in 2019 and 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 Kunstverein of Kassel (2018), Kunsthalle Lingen (2017), Cité International des Arts (2016), 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).

 

Teresa Solar (Madrid, 1985) lives and works in Madrid.  She has been a resident and visiting professor in the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste from Stuttgart (2016), finalist in the Award Cervezas Alhambra de Arte Emergente (ARCOmadrid 2017) and of the program for mentors Fundación Rolex (2016), she received the production scholarship of Fundación Botín (2014), of CAM (2011) and the award Generaciones (2012). Currently she presents in Index, Stockholm Ride Ride Ride, an individual exhibition that had been in Matadero (Madrid) with the title Cabalga, Cabalga, Cabalga. She has recently shown Flotation Line at Der Tank, Basel (June 2018) and in the program Compositions of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend (September, 2018) and has been part of the 2018 expedition “The Current” organized by TBA21-Academy. She has exhibited individually at La Panera Lleida (2016), Matadero Madrid (2014) and CA2M Móstoles (2012) and has participated in collective exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich (March, 2018), at Kunstverein Braunschweig (June, 2018) , in the section “El futuro no es lo que va a pasar, sinóo lo que vamos a hacer” to ARCOmadrid (February 2018), at Kunstverein München, Munich (2017), the Fundación Marcelino Botín Foundation, Santander (2016) and Macro, Roma (2015), among others.

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