Lola Lasurt
Exercici de ritme
DECEMBER - JANUARY 2015
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.
