Category Archives: 2022

Anatomies of stone, of wood. Iconicity among the columns of the forest. Afforestation, reforestation of images as living animals. Trees that work on wood. Visionary trees, icons: carvings of an imaginary raised by the same botany that fattens it. Forests with the smile of archaic sculpture. Crumbling stones on the stones. Men who become earth and trees who become man. Reverted figures of unending majesty. And three works, these: Pedra [Stone], Quatre columnes [Four Columns] and Un capitell [A Capital], ready to ambush. Only three works because the works are no longer indifferent to quantity, not anymore.

Hannah Collins

Galeria Joan Prats is pleased to present at Paris Photo 2022 fair, on Booth F05, the works by:

 

Cabello/Carceller (Paris 1963/Madrid 1964). Their work is set in a territory where they question, reflect or fracture the roles and stereotypes associated to gender. In their works, masculine or feminine roles are revised. We will show an iconic work from this artistic duo: Archive: Drag Models (2007-ongoing) long-term project that highlights film scenes where male characters question the collective imaginary.

 

Hannah Collins (UK, 1956) is known for her work in expanding the fields of photography and film. Her works are embedded in historical and social frameworks. Already shown in our Paris Photo booth in 2017 and 2018, we will present this time a b/w vintage print from the late eighties, as well as two photographs related to the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy.

 

Carles Congost (Spain, 1970) has always incorporated to his work, theatrical stagings that question the mechanisms and stereotypes of Subculture, Pop icons, music and the art world itself. We will show Mambo belonging to the artist’s latest project, a series of four large-format photographs entitled Boys on Memphis (2022). They present us with a trio of models carrying out simple stagings inside a set whose aesthetics recall both the Memphis Group and Art Deco and Pop Art of the sixties.

 

 

SEE PDF PREVIEW

 

 

the magic carpet

Documentary film: ‘The magic carpet. Voices to remember Joan de Muga’

 

The exhibition ‘The Magic Carpet. For Joan de Muga’ is a tribute to Joan de Muga, founder and director of Joan Prats Gallery since 1976, when it opened, until 2020. The exhibition will bring together the work of artists who have been part of the gallery since the beginning to the present, together with photographs, letters, videos and documentation, to explain the history of the gallery and also Ediciones Polígrafa and other projects by Joan de Muga such as Fundació Espai Poblenou.

 

We will show works by Juan Araujo, Francis Bacon, Alfons Borrell, Joan Brossa, Cabrita, Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, Chillida, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Victoria Civera, Hannah Collins, Helen Frankenthaler, Luis Gordillo, Guinovart, Hernández Pijuan, Wifredo Lam, Louise Lawler, Miralda, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Muntadas, Pablo Palazuelo, Perejaume, Joan Ponç, Fernando Prats, Ràfols Casamada, Caio Reisewitz, Julião Sarmento, George Segal, José María Sicilia, Antoni Tàpies, Juan Uslé, Eulàlia Valldosera, Sue Williams

 

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a drawing by Joan Ponç dedicated to Joan de Muga, in which he portrayed him on a flying carpet. This sketch refers to his enterprising and visionary character, his passion for traveling and for imagining new projects.

 

We are organizing the exhibition with the complicity of Carles Guerra, who will write the text of the publication that we will publish later.

Revelations on a Shapeless Sphere

Revelations on a Shapeless Sphere

Fonteta, June 17 – August 28, 2022

 

Pere Noguera, Luis Gordillo, Ludovica Carbotta, Muntadas, Francesco Arena, Victoria Civera, Perejaume, Pere Llobera, Ignacio Uriarte, Anna Dot, The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin, Jordi Mitjà, Rasmus Nilausen, Ángela de la Cruz, Lola Lasurt, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Fernando Prats

 

 

We are delighted to present again a collaborative project of galleries Bombon, Joan Prats and NoguerasBlanchard. The proposal for this season once again brings together artists from the three galleries and from different generations in an exhibition format that will be based on the exquisite corpse principle, with a text by Eduard Escoffet written for the occasion.

 

Focusing on this act of collective exchange, during the summer of 2022, the artists invited to participate, the first of them Pere Noguera (La Bisbal, Girona; 1941), will be in charge of selecting the first group of artists, and so on, until the end of a series of exhibition proposals made up of works spanning different generations and imaginaries.

 

 

Text Eduard Escoffet

 

 

Chapter 1: opening Saturday June 25
Pere Noguera, Luis Gordillo, Ludovica Carbotta (Room 1)
Pere Noguera, Anna Dot, The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin (Room 2)

 

Chapter 2: opening Saturday July 16
Ludovica Carbotta, Muntadas, Francesco Arena (Room 1)
The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin, Jordi Mitjà, Rasmus Nilausen (Room 2)

 

Chapter 3: opening Saturday August 6
Francesco Arena, Victoria Civera, Perejaume (Room 1)
Rasmus Nilausen, Angela de la Cruz, Lola Lasurt (Room 2)

 

Chapter 4: opening Thursday 18
Perejaume, Pere Llobera, Ignacio Uriarte (Room 1)
Lola Lasurt, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Fernando Prats (Room 2)

 

 

c/ Empordà, 10, Fonteta, Girona
June: Friday to Sunday, 5 – 9 pm
July and Aug: Monday to Sunday, 5 – 9 pm

 

 

 

Daniel de la Barra

Opening Thursday, 30th June, 5-9pm

Conversation with the artist Daniel de la Barra and the curator Alicia Chillida, Thursday, 30th June, 7pm. Please, confirm assistance at galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

Thursday, 28 July, 19h: commented visit by Olivier Collet. Please, confirm assistance at galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

As part of Artnou, we present at Galeria Joan Prats the exhibition of Daniel de la Barra Destierro, curated by Alicia Chillida.

 

 

The inhabitants from the Terres de l’Ebre coexist in a threatened territory. Daniel de la Barra first visits the heart of the Ebro Delta, in 2021, as a guest of Centre Lo Pati to accomplish an artistic residence in Balada, next to anthropologist María Faciolince. The project reflects on the reconstruction of the landscape’s narrative, one that keeps on sustaining and perpetuating the industry’s extraction practices. It compounds a register based on images about socio-environmental violence of a political and historical nature with reminiscences to the botanic expeditions that consolidated the ways of seeing the natural as a potential land of conquest. As references, the artist uses the botanic expedition illustrated books, the paintings of traveling artists in Latin America and the Romantic Landscape paintings from XVIII and XIX centuries.

 

The exhibition in Joan Prats Gallery is the result of translating these researches to an art installation that combines diverse medium: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, video, documents… A new ecosystem recreated through the artistic field. The representation arises from a need to give an answer to a complex landscape dominated by political, economic and social forces, that contribute to its (de) structuring. This territory subjugated him then and hasn’t ceased to deepen in his skin, in his most profound places. He has explored his lands and, immersed in them, emerges the fundamental encounter with its people. Prove of this is the tight collaboration with Josep Pinyol, Luís Martinez’s composition and musical interpretation in the Santa Bárbara’s church organ, and the poems recited by Miquel Curto, in Tivenys.

 

Read more

 

In collaboration with Real Academia de España en Roma, Fundació Sorigué, Lo Pati Centre d’Art Terres de l’Ebre and Sala d’Art Jove in Generalitat de Catalunya.

 

 

Daniel de la Barra. Lima, Perú (1992). Lives and Works in Rome.

 

Daniel de la Barra moves between painting, installation and public intervention, focusing his work on the re-construction of narratives in societies within the homogenization of the public landscape and the hierarchical imposition of powers of domination within the framework of colonial capitalism. He began his studies in 2012 at the Escuela de Arte Contemporáneo Corriente Alterna (Lima, Peru) until 2014, when he moved to Madrid to continue his painting studies.

 

He has carried out artistic residencies at La Escocesa Fabrica de creació, Piramidon Centre d’art Contemporani, Homesession, in Barcelona where he lived 7 years, and The Nerdrum School (Sweden). He has developed several exhibition projects and interventions such as “Pròxima Obertura” at Montjuic Castle, Barcelona, “Esc-Out” at Fabra i Coats Centre d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, “Ruta de los Indianos – Consideraciones de la Ciudad Moderna,” at Lo Pati within the Bienal de Amposta, “Paisajes Deseados” at Arts Santa Mónica, Barcelona, “SUBVERSIÓ! Manifestacions perifèriques per a una història reversible” at El Born CCM, Barcelona or “Invation 30230” at Museo Central de Lima. In 2018 and 2019 he has received the Research and Experimentation Grant from La Escocesa, the Young Art Prize of Catalonia 2019 (Sala d’Art Jove) and in 2021 to develop his project “Real Expedición Botánica” in collaboration with La Panera de Lleida and Lo Pati, Amposta.

Camila Cañeque

On May 26, we will open Hole In The Ground, a collective exhibition that brings together works by Cabrita, Camila Cañeque, Hannah Collins, Pablo del Pozo, Mercedes Pimiento and Fernando Prats.

 

The title of the exhibition, inspired by a David Bowie song, refers to the main theme around the displayed pieces, the concept of territory and its materiality. Some of the works deal with the ways of representing the ground, understood as horizontality, both in nature and in the urban environment. In this way, human activity is put in the spotlight, evidencing aspects such as belonging to a territory, the memory of a place or exploitation of the soil and its impact.

 

While some of the presented works speak of very specific places, others refer to the material that we step on when walking. Cabrita, in his work Fingerprints, raises a horizontal plane to the wall, thus turning a simple board, a humble material that was surely used as a work surface in his studio, into a testimony of his artistic activity. The artist offers us a new look at an everyday object and also a review of the place of creation.

 

Camila Cañeque’s work ground on ground on ground shows accumulations of historical layers through grounds. The artist’s work addresses passivity and, in this installation, she uses the notion of the in-between, creating a space that is neither above nor below, before nor after.

 

Hannah Collins’ work Nomad places emphasis on the surface, on skin, on the outside, signaling the artist’s interest in boundaries – most specifically of the body.  With this portrait of a character whose face remain hidden, the artist allows us to participate through the free interpretation of the image. The artist deals with the historical, the social and the political through images of everyday scene, such as Floor of dreams. This work, made in La Mina, is part of an extensive project by the artist focused on this neighbourhood inhabited mainly by the gypsy community in Barcelona.

 

In the work of Pablo del Pozo, interest in the territory is a recurring theme. In Tierra rojiza, the artist uses the pig as a symbol of his region of origin, to create a materiality that refers to the stereotyped vision of Extremadura as an arid and dry landscape.

 

Mercedes Pimiento’s work is characterized by making visible all the material culture that nourishes our society but which we try to hide, turning into sculptures the structures that are hidden in architecture, such as pipes, cables and canals, using organic or artificial materials.

 

Fernando Prats is interested in the territory of Chile and South America and its representation through historical or reinterpreted maps. In Territorio silenciado #2, he proposes a critical view of a continent condemned to be endlessly exploited. In Affatus, on the other hand, the canvas becomes the territory of creation where, subverting the traditional gesture of the painter, the worms have left their own mark. We also present an unreleased video, Zonificación, accompanied by a work on paper, composed from the projection of the recorded action, and which establishes a dialogue with the spiral staircase of the Macba, in a centrifugal movement that is access, exit, ascend and descend, the body and the architecture in connection and amplification with the Richard Meier building.

 

 

Cabrita (Lisbon, 1956) lives and works in Lisbon. His work has received international recognition and has been crucial to the understanding of sculpture since the mid-eighties. In recent years he has had solo exhibitions at CAC Malaga, Mudam Luxembourg, CGAC Santiago de Compostela, Museo Serralves Porto, Palazzo Molina de Cartagena, Mexico, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Galeria Arte Moderna e Contemporânea, Lisbon, MAXXI Rome, The Arts Club of Chicago and Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, France. He has participated in important international exhibitions, such as Documenta IX in Kassel (1992), the 21st and 24th São Paulo Biennial (1994 and 1998), the Venice Biennial (in 1997, in 2003 representing Portugal and in 2013) and the 10th Lyon Biennial (2009). He is currently showing the sculptural installation Les Trois Grâces, at Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, and an installation entitled Field at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Camila Cañeque (Barcelona, 1984) explores in different ways the theme of resistance to progress through performance, sound, objects, installations and writing. She has exhibited in several art centres in Barcelona such as La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Blue Project Foundation, Fabra i Coats, Caixaforum, Museo Lázaro Galdiano, in Madrid and at the Queens Museum of Art, New York. She was a finalist for the Miquel Casablancas Prize and participated in residencies at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, Fabra i Coats, Barcelona, Nida Art Colony, Lithuania, ZKU, Berlin, Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro, among others.

Hannah Collins (London, 1956). Currently lives between London and Almeria. Between 1989 and 2010, she lived in Barcelona, exhibiting at Galeria Joan Prats since 1992. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, was nominated for the 1993 Turner Prize, and received the 2015 SPECTRUM International Photography Prize, including exhibitions at Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Camden Art Centre in London and Baltic Centre in Newcastle. Among other museums and art centres, she has exhibited at SFMOMA, San Francisco; 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; Fundación La Caixa, Madrid and Barcelona; La Laboral, Gijón; Artium, Vitoria; CAC, Málaga.

Pablo del Pozo (Badajoz, 1994) lives and works in Barcelona. Graduated in Fine Arts at the Universitat de Barcelona, he was selected in the Biennial of Valls and has won the Guasch-Coranty Award, participating in the exhibition at the Centre Tecla Sala, in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. He also participated in the Biennial Jeune Création Européenne with exhibitions in museums in various European cities. He has received the creation award of the Sala d’Art Jove de la Generalitat de Catalunya, exhibiting there in 2018. He was nominated for the Miquel Casablancas Prize, and in 2019 he exhibited individually at the Arranz Bravo Foundation in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Mercedes Pimiento (Seville, 1990) lives and works in Barcelona, where she is pursuing a doctorate in Fine Arts. With a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Sevilla and a Master’s Degree in Artistic Production and Research from the Universitat de Barcelona, she has been selected for programs and grants such as INJUVE, the Madrid Community Training Program – Open Studio, the Kiosko Project of the José Guerrero Centre, the Guasch Coranty Foundation Grant for artistic creation, the Sant Andreu Contemporani residency program, or the Iniciarte Program. She has exhibited in museums and art centres such as Centre Tecla Sala in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, CAAC Seville, Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Fundación Naturgy in A Coruña, Centro José Guerrero in Granada, among others.

Fernando Prats (Santiago de Chile, 1967) has lived and worked in Barcelona since 1990. His work is known for the actions undertaken mostly in Chile, among them Gran Sur, Isla Elefante, Antarctica, Acción Lota, Géiser del Tatio, Salar de Atacama, Mina a Rajo Abierto o Congelación, Collins Glacier and Chilean Antarctica. He has participated in exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale; Mediations Biennale, Poznan; Biennial of the Canary Islands, Chile Triennial, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile. He has significant works in the public space of Chile and a work commissioned by Barcelona. He is currently presenting the solo exhibition Aun tendría que haber luciérnagas, at Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria, Museo Nacional de Bogotá.

Luis Gordillo

Opening Thursday 10th of March, at 5 pm

Meeting with the artist on Wednesday 20th of April, at 7 pm.
Please RSVP at galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

We are glad to present Luis Gordillo’s sixth exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, entitled ‘Re/Encuentro’, where we will show recent works by the artist, such as paintings, drawings and large polyptychs of digital prints.

For this exhibition, Ignasi Aballí has written a text titled ‘Subinsconciente’, in an effort to pay tribute to the work of Luis Gordillo.

ARCOmadrid 2022

Galeria Joan Prats

Booth 9C06 & booth 7B19 (ARCO 40+1)

 

For our booth at ARCOmadrid 2022, we present a selection of pieces by our artists, with a leading role for painting -Luis Gordillo, Lola Lasurt, Alfons Borrell and Juan Uslé- and others located at the limit of pictorial language -José María Sicilia , Fernando Prats-, or that reflect on the genre, such as Perejaume. Dialoguing with these works, a piece by Muntadas with a more conceptual vision of painting will occupy a special place.

 

We also present for the first time works by Alicia Framis, beginning our collaboration with the artist.

 

The Joan Prats Gallery has been selected for the special program 40+1, a section curated by María Inés Rodríguez, Francesco Stocchi and Sergio Rubira that celebrates the fair’s 40th anniversary. In this section we will present emblematic works by three artists who have been very important in the history of our gallery, such as Hernández Pijuan, Ràfols Casamada and Perejaume.

 

SEE PREVIEW

 

 

Victoria Civera

Opening Thursday, December 2, 5-9pm, with the artist

 

Guided visit Thursday, March 3, at 7:00 p.m. Please confirm attendance: galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

Guided visit with Victoria Civera at the Balcón Foyer del Liceu, Friday, December 3, at 11am. Prior reservation at galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

 

 

In the studio, when I prepare an exhibition I start from scratch, from the need to write a small sentence, a minimal text as a poem. I like to proceed in this way, feeling freedom, swimming in an open sea.

Feeling is thinking. Thinking is feeling, with my hand and mind united. I feel, I analyse, I determine by drawing, also painting, building a piece, I discover myself, I decipher my feelings, in the density that I perceive them.

 

In 1997 I used an image of butterflies as the cover of a catalogue, with the title ‘Mother Moon’… I feel that butterflies give us luck.

When we were little, my father used to give my sisters, brother and me a shoebox with silk cocoons in the embryonic stage. He taught us how to feed them and, for this, we collected mulberry leaves so that they could complete their cycle. It was a great lesson. Thus, with fragility, we begin to respect life and understand it as evolution and transformation. Also, what it means to make a commitment, day by day.’      Victoria Civera

 

 

On December 2 we inaugurate Victoria Civera’s second solo exhibition at the Galeria Joan Prats, titled ‘Ocelo’, with the artist presence.

 

The exhibition gathers her most recent works, and shows the variety of her production: installation-object, photography, video, drawing and painting, executed last year between Saro, Cantabria, and New York.

 

We find in the pieces displayed the themes that Victoria Civera has worked on throughout her career, such as the body, the female universe, the personal, the individual environment and the domestic. In constant dialogue between the figurative world and the abstract world, her work is a conceptual search of personal imaginaries.

 

Ocelo refers to the eye, the pupil, the macro inner world of the human eye. The image of the circle, recurrent in her work, also alludes to time as a circular movement. In the video titled Ocelo, a short series of photograms shows the fluttering of a butterfly hooked by its wings on the windshield wiper of a car moving on the highway. She tells us about beauty in transformation and about impotence, of the ungraspable and permanent fragility.

 

Civera’s work starts from emotional places, of parcels of her present environment and memories of her childhood. They mix in turn, at the present time, common feelings are mixed due to isolation, uncertainty, change, strangeness, fear, as she expresses in her large installations titled Horizontal versátil and Torre, N.Y. black and white, confinamiento.

 

 

 

 

 

In one of the exhibition rooms we find two long tables with aluminium works painted in different colours, titled Entropía (Saro). On them, various natural and artificial fibres from dust accumulation have been formed and collected as residue from washing and drying the clothes used in Saro. In their casual accumulation, when collected, they acquire irreversible irregular shapes similar to the wings of butterflies, with a rough and velvety texture. The pieces start from the absolute zero of which Victoria talks about, towards evolution and transformation, between the eye and the form, giving validity to the infinite fragmentary diversity.

 

Other fragments of landscapes are shown in the Tablets series, small-format paintings on metal and wood, that also incorporate natural fabrics and other materials. These are small cartographies of perceptions or intuitions, where the expressiveness of the chromatic becomes important.

 

The poetic dimension of Victoria Civera’s work opens up to us when interpreting her pieces. Her creative process implies a permanent state of receptivity to the environment and invites the viewer to relate to her work at a leisurely pace, while prompting us to pay attention to the smallest details that compose it.

 

 

Victoria Civera (Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955) lives and works between New York and Saro, Cantabria. Her career began in the seventies, working mainly on photomontage and introducing painting in the following decade. In the mid-eighties, Victoria Civera moved to New York and included installation-object in her artistic practice. Her work, with a dreamlike content and based on the feminine universe, has moved between large-scale pieces and pieces of a restrained and suggestive poetics, often incorporating objects from domestic life.

 

Her solo exhibitions include Inasible, Real Casa de la Moneda, Madrid (2019), Every Day. Ni la palabra ni el silencio, Centro de Arte Alcobendas (2017), Sueños inclinados, IVAM, Valencia (2011), Atando el cielo, CAC, Málaga (2010), Túnel eterno, Palacio de los Condes de Gabia, Granada (2006), and Bajo la piel, Espacio 1, MNCARS, Madrid (2005).

 

She has also participated in exhibitions in art centres such as CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, MAS in Santander, Bombas Gens in Valencia, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Caixaforum in Barcelona, Mumok- Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, MACBA in Barcelona, The Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, The New Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work is part of the collections of institutions and museums such as MACBA, MNCARS, IVAM, CAC Málaga, Es Baluard de Palma, Artium de Vitoria-Gasteiz, Colección Banco de España, Colección “la Caixa”, Patio Herreriano de Valladolid or Collection European Bank.

 

Until December 20, she exhibits a series of 40 drawings in the Balcón Foyer of the Liceu of Barcelona for the Season of the Opera of the Liceu. In 2022 she will present a retrospective exhibition at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.