Tag Archives: artist

Badalona, ​​1991

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana expresses himself mainly through drawing and painting, although his approach to creation has, at times, certain similarities with the literary essay.

 

His work processes are usually of a very long duration. He formalizes his aesthetic investigations mainly in large formats, charcoal canvases, epic scenes in oil but also miniatures on glass.

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana’s work is characterized by his interest in classical references: Renaissance painting, sculpture and Italian architecture. He produces an iconography resulting from the natural observation of both human and animal models that runs through all his canvases. Marcel is not afraid to face great themes such as love, death, resurrection, however, elements of everyday life or popular culture can always appear in his paintings.

 

From the allegory, which ironically includes contemporary grotesque representations, in his own words, his work is built around a single purpose: “elevate the spirit.”

45. I tu ni te'n vas adonar, 2019

Opening Thursday, June 25, 5-8pm
Exhibition 25/06 – 17/10/2020

 

Visit by appointment only using Form.
(T. 93 216 02 84 – galeria@galeriajoanprats.com)

Joan Prats Warehouse. Passatge Saladrigas, 5 Barcelona.

 

 

As part of Artnou, Galeria Joan Prats presents the exhibition ‘El retorn a Ripollet’ by Marcel Rubio Juliana (Barcelona, 1991), that brings together a wide range of works, made between 2018 and 2019.

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana expresses himself mainly through drawing and painting, although his approach to creation has to do with the literary essay. Large charcoal canvases and oil miniatures confer the rhythm of a fragmented story that develops an apparently linear story, with unity of time and place. We could see certain analogies with the “nouveau roman”, where different points of view are adopted away from the narrator’s unique vision and where the writing itself acquires autonomy regardless of what is written. The Dogma film script could be another reference: both use real locations, flee from superfluous effects and seek a crude realism, creating a series of rules to follow and, sometimes, to transgress.

 

Alluding to his own experiences and desires, the artist evokes a summer day in which an stranger unknowingly becomes the main character of a singular story. Located in a coastal city near Barcelona, different sequences invite us on a journey in which, following a phenomenological method, contemplation, drift and falling in love offer a precise description of the environment.

 

The narration follows in the footsteps of a young man, from the train station to the city center, passing by the beach, the Yacht Club and various shopping streets, creating a cinematographic record of the places evoked. It also shows us bodies enjoying the water, the view of the sun over the sea, a kiosk, the facade of a theater, stains of humidity on the wall, a flower, a group of friends on a bar´s terrace… everything is there, present in the memory, although everything could be imagined.

 

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana (Barcelona, 1991) studied at Pau Gargallo School of Art and Design (Badalona), where he graduated in 2007. He later studied the Fine Arts degree at the University of Barcelona, which he completed in 2013.

 

Since then, he has shown his work in the following exhibitions: Surfeit, Fundación Arranz-Bravo, l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona (2018); Swab Art Fair, Barcelona, represented by Passatge Studio gallery (2016); The muscles of Zarathustra (with the writer Victor Balcells Matas), Passatge Studio, Barcelona (2016); Pasajes, La Puntual de Mercantic, Sant Cugat, Barcelona (2016); Carles Boïges, cycle of exhibitions, with the collaboration of Tom Carr and his team, TCTeamWork, Badalona (2014); University of Fine Arts, Barcelona (2014); Drawing the night (group exhibition), Anquin Gallery, Reus, Tarragona (2014).

 

He has been nominated for different awards: Bienal Torres Garcia, Mataró, with the work Spectro, 2016; Ynglada-Guillot Foundation, with the drawing Geschlagen, 2015, exhibited at Espai Volart, Barcelona; Drawing Prize of the Güell Foundation, exhibited in Palau Güell, Barcelona, 2015-16; Art Biennial : Tapiró Painting Prize with the drawing What time is it?, 2013.

 

In 2021 he will present an exhibition at Espai 13 of the Miró Foundation, in a cycle curated by Pere Llobera.

Cabello / Carceller solo exhibition at Regelbau 411. Kunsthal for international samtidskunst. Thyholm, Denmark.

 

Opening Dec. 14 at 2pm.

Exhibition: December 14 2019 – February 16 2020.

 

 

Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller have been working together for three decades to exploring how particular body ideals and particular notions dominate our visual culture, how these notions create special kinds of representation, and how to offer alternatives to these notions.

 

The two bunkers in Regelbau 411 each present a video work that has been transformed into two site-specific video and text installations. The artists visited the art centre on Thyholm this summer and have since developed this special exhibition design.

 

 

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Fabian Marcaccio Paintants Lab

18.10 – 01.12.2019
SCI-Arc Gallery

 

SCI-Arc is pleased to announce that it will be hosting an exhibition featuring the work of Argentinian artist Fabian Marcaccio, entitled Paintants Lab. The exhibition will run from October 18 through December 1 in the SCI-Arc Gallery, with an opening reception held on October 18 at 7pm.

Marcaccio (b. 1963, Rosario, Argentina) is one of the pioneers of digital painting. He started his practice in the 1990s with the Altered Genetics of Painting, emphasizing the alteration of pictorial content in relation to biogenetics. He moved to an urban scale with a new type of muralism with his Environmental Paintings. These works unified aspects of film, urbanism, architecture, and painting.

 

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Altamira lll - Caio Reisewitz

ALTAMIRA

Saturday September 21, 14:00
Caio Reisewitz in conversation with Daniela Labra
Friends with Books: Art Book Fair Berlin 2019

Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

 

The artist will present his project and photobook Altamira, published by Artphilein Editions

 

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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

Pablo del Pozo

Badajoz, 1994

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

The works by Pablo del Pozo have a strong autobiographical character, linked to the experiences of the artist. The feeling of belonging to a place, displacement and nostalgia are subjects that concern him. From the characteristics of the materials used (clay, plaster, pigments and also found objects), he seeks to talk about the precariousness of life, thus generating a reflection on the daily reality.

Cabrita

Lisbon, 1956

Lives and works in Lisbon

 

Cabrita’s complex work can be characterized by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of means: painting, photography, drawing, and sculptures composed of industrial materials and found objects.

 

His work has steadily received international acknowledgement, thus becoming crucial and decisive for the understanding of sculpture from the mid-1980’s onwards. By using simple materials that are submitted to constructive processes, Cabrita recycles almost anonymous reminiscences of primordial gestures and actions repeated in everyday life. Centered in questions relative to space and memory, his works gain a suggestive power of association which reach a metaphorical dimension by going beyond the visual.

 

The complex theoretical and formal diversity of the work of Cabrita proceeds from an anthropological reflection, which is contrary to the reductionism of sociological discourse. In fact, it is on silences and indagations that the work of Cabrita is based and built on.

Compositions. Flotation line

27.09.18 – 30.09.18

Industrial Akroll

27.9 / 28.9 / 29.9, 11 am-8 pm + 30.9, 11 am-3 pm

 

The former “Industrial Akroll” factory in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat started out as a house-workshop. In the 60’s of the 20th century it grew up to a 2.000 m2 surface dedicated to the production of small metallic pieces for footwear, such as buckles and other ornaments. The machines made such a noise that there was a system of codes with coloured lights to communicate inside the whole factory. Calera Studio is currently promoting a new project to transform the building to artistic and cultural uses and to dynamise the surroundings of Can Trinxet in Santa Eulalia and the Cultural District of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

 

With Flotation Line, Teresa Solar Abboud presents a sculptural set that evokes a marine landscape intervened by humanity. Through different elements inspired by marine flora and fauna, as well as objects and instruments that suggest man’s relationship with the sea, the artist offers us a “sculptural ecosystem” – as she defines it – with the desire to fictionally transform the exhibition space into an aquatic environment. In the installation we distinguish elements such as the ladder of a boat, the hand of a diver or a hoisted whale, as well as other objects and figures that are related to stories from classical mythology related to the marine environment. The work starts from a formal and conceptual investigation around the waterline understood as an unstable horizon that becomes a border, an axis that separates two realms and generates a distinction between everything that remains below and above the surface of the water. This floating line is represented in the space by a long arched blue tube that articulates the space horizontally and in relation to which the rest of the elements are arranged at different heights. Other smaller pieces, such as glazed ceramics, bronze eyes or an arched shape rubber bone, also form part of the set. Flotation Line is a Solar Abboud production that results from the curatorial commission Chus Martínez gave to the artist for her monographic exhibition at Der Tank (the exhibition space of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW, in Basel), which was inaugurated at the beginning of last summer. For her participation in BGW’s programme Compositions, the artist has adapted this sculptural set to the characteristics of this old factory space.

Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye (part 3)

We are pleased to present Julião Sarmento’s fourth exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, titled Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye (part 3), in which we will show his recent work, with installation, sculpture and painting.

 

The title of the exhibition recalls that of the first exhibition held at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957, which included paintings by various artists and in which the installation and assemblage pioneer, Edward Kienholz, participated.

 

In the exhibition, the installation Crash Dummy, 2016, and the sculpture Broken Alice, 2014, coexist with a series of paintings that show triangular shapes, delicately drawn, based on the fundamental principles of fractal geometry, and other works inspired by the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen of Degas. This diversity of supports and techniques present in the exhibition is characteristic of the artistic practice of Julião Sarmento and, on this occasion, stands out for the combination of materials that could be defined as poor with materials subject to advanced technological processes.

 

Julião Sarmento produces a work that adopts multiple forms with drawings, paintings, sculptures, performances and videos that speak of the artifices of seduction and the mechanisms of desire. From its beginnings, in the middle of the seventies, the work of Julião Sarmento has been characterized by its archival character. Thus, in his works, they can appear feminine silhouettes, architectural plans, literary fragments and objects.

 

Often, these coded iconographies explicitly present us with the signs needed to identify to the source of his imagery and its meanings. This constant oscillation between appearance and reality, fiction and documentation, invention and fact with which Sarmento confronts us is not at all a gratuitous game. The assemblages fashioned by the artist play on this dialectic of superficial interpretation, where many elements are perfectly identifiable, even banal or anodyne, and deeper interpretation that drives us to seek correspondences, links and relations without realizing that the very fact of carrying out this search is itself the meaning we are supposed to discover.

The artist proposes an itinerary in which the dialogue that takes place between the works and the spectator becomes fundamental. A dialogue that often moves away from words to give way to admiration, contemplation and interest in understanding the subtle, silent and dreamlike atmosphere that surrounds his universe. Self-presentation takes on new importance from materials and also through the titles of works, as Autoretrat (Self-portrait) or Autoretrat al taller (Self-portrait in the studio).

 

The artistic practice of Jordi Alcaraz transcends the traditional categories of painting, sculpture and drawing to approach the assemblage and installation, reflecting on the notion of volume, language as an idea and the passage of time. According to J. F. Yvars, “the works of art are organisms created from living materials, subjected to the alchemy of the elements and expressive techniques, which impose their verisimilitude over time. They breathe, moan, ring, crack up, and readjust in the required harmony that will sketch out the unfinished symphony of his plastic art”. The combination of materials as diverse as mirrors, books or methacrylate makes the elements interact by learning how to breathe, moan or sound together.

 

The text Plastic, which Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja dedicates to Jordi Alcaraz, focuses his attention on the plastic, on the methacrylate more concretely, and concludes as follows: “For some time the transparent “crystal” plastic has appeared to display a quality that has no name. This quality, somewhere between watery and airy, but in essence rhetorical, has been grudgingly described as something secret that cannot be divulged since its limits are still not known. Experts proclaim it as a shiny but also extremely unctuous material. It can be used for anything. It is the material that substitutes all others. The fact it shines is not a shortcoming. And it is a substitute for everything”.

Teresa Solar

 

Through ceramic sculptures, videos and photographs, the artist outlines a discontinuous narration, starting from her own body and linked to space exploration. Precisely, the works of the exhibition revolve around the relationship of the artist’s body with her work materials, essentially the ceramics. Through the performative link and the double meaning between subject and material, between structure and mass, Teresa Solar reflects on concepts such as control, resistance, a definitely precarious balance of sense and accident.

 

The title of the exhibition, Ground Control, has a double meaning. On one hand it is a direct reference to the material, ground or clay, and the pressure exerted on it when working on the potter’s wheel. The body of the artist adopts a position of resistance to control the material, which is plastic and dynamic, this effort makes the body operate as a static structure, as an object, as matter. Through the title, this minimal experience of communication and conflicting balance between subject and matter increases in scale, linking with space travel: “Ground Control” is the center of operations from which the operation of the flight of a spacecraft is monitored. Serving the two for the purpose of a successful expedition, one cannot exist without the other and vice versa, they are part of the same mechanism, a single subject divided into two bodies.

 

The idea of tense balance between oneself and the world is present in the videos of the exhibition. In Being a person you did not know you were, we see a puppet that adopts the role of the divided adult, of an unknown entity who is born in us and who looks at us from the outside, who turns us in foreigners inside our body. Continuing with the idea of the divided subject, in the video Ground control, the artist is transformed 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.

 

This double relationship is also present in the sculptures of the series Crushed by pressure. The pressure of the metal bars and cords repeats the process of creation of the ceramics, remembering the pile of rubble of an accident, in which the ceramic becomes the body of the subject, controlled and stabilized through structures that deform it. Ceramics allow us to emphasize the contrast between the primitivism of a material and a millenary technique, with the technological sophistication of the ceramic skins that cover the rockets.

 

In the pieces Pie de foto: Masa and Chamber, Breath, the artist in the potter’s Wheel sign language on White clay balls, creating words that are then compacted and deformed by their own weight, forming a language that exists in the phisical space. In Pie de foto: Masa, ceramic columns hold the photograph of a bone while the engraved stretch marks themselves mean “mass”; the missing body is completed trough the text that supports it.

 

 

Teresa Solar Abboud (Madrid, 1985) lives and works in Madrid. She has been a resident and visiting professor at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart (2016), she was a finalist of the Rolex Mentorship Program (2016), she received the production grant Fundación Botín (2014), the production grant CAM (2011) and the prize Generaciones (2012). She has individually exhibited at La Panera Lleida (2016), Matadero Madrid (2014) & CA2M Móstoles (2012). Recently she has been selected as finalist for the Prize Cervezas Alhambra of Emergent Art during ARCOmadrid 2017. She will show soon at Haus der Kunst and at Kunstverein München.

 

Alfons Borrell

Text by Alicia Kopf

 

We are pleased to announce Alfons Borrell’s new exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, next Thursday December 15th.

 

After the exhibition dedicated to him by Fundació Miró, which gathered sixty years of artistic practice, we present the most recent work of this exceptional creator, who conceives painting as a space of relationship with the world and, at the same time, as an impulse, an emotion and that has stayed away of the tendencies and the prevailing movements throughout his trajectory.

 

His work is characterized by the importance of color and debate between subtlety and intensity, between openness to nature and introspective recollection. Bound since 1955 to the language of abstraction, he has been influenced in different moments of his life by Anglada Camarasa and Brossa, two artists who, beyond an aesthetic, provided him a vital and ethical attitude towards art. Borrell’s work has been and is currently intense and constant, always moving in parameters that he repeats with rigor and dedication.

 

The color in Alfons Borrell’s work is an invading agent that moves and fluctuates; the artist defines it as an extension of the person, which blends you with the environment, “if you walk through a forest full of fir trees you turn green, if you could immerse yourself in the sea you would get out blue… ” He says” I would like to be painting “. It is a vision of color and painting, linked to the concept, to the thought, and also to the experience. Borrell uses only five pigments extracted from the earth, green, blue, orange, ocher and gray; while white, from the surface of the canvas, emerges as an apparition of light.

 

To this work of color, which he has been using repeatedly for its symbolic connotations, the perception of presences and absences, from a particular experience of limits, is added. In his paintings, vertical lines cross the surface symbolically designating a presence, horizontal lines refer to the horizon, and the inability to contain color matter, which sometimes overflows marked margins, shows us the experience of the unlimited.

 

Borrell’s work needs an active contemplation on the part of the viewer, who establishes a relation of tension with the works. Their experimentation does not depend on codes of interpretation or previous knowledge, but his painting seems to go directly to the observers, interpellating them, but always leaving a space of freedom as a possibility to inhabit its language.

 

Alfons Borrell (Barcelona, 1931) lives and works in Sabadell. After an initial stage of formation in figurative painting, he got started in abstraction in 1955, with works close to informalism. Far removed from the academic art, he was part of Grup Gallot, an iconoclast and revolutionary group linked to gestural abstraction. This radical experience allowed him to find his own way, of sobriety and silence, throughout the 60’s. From 1976, he began to title his works with the exact date of its completion, like a journal, the same year that he participated in the group show Pintura 1, in the recently inaugurated Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona, where he would return with a solo show two years later and, in 2015, with a great retrospective. Among the recent years’ exhibitions, stand the one held in 2006 at Centre Cultural Santa Tecla, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, which traveled to Museu de Sabadell, the one about work on paper held in 2011 at Fundació Palau de Caldes d’Estrac and the one held the same year at Fundació Vila Casas. He has participated in group shows at MNAC, Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, MACBA, CCCB and Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Flanders Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In 2014 he received the GAC prize, an honorary award in recognition of his long career.

Luis Gordillo

Museo Reina Sofia. Edificio Nouvel

Colección 3.

La obra de Luis Gordillo (1934) nace de una compleja síntesis de elementos diversos, provenientes del informalismo, el arte pop y las corrientes geométricas, fuentes que alimentan su obra de manera simultánea e intencionalmente contradictoria. Su síntesis pictórica se presenta como la constante deconstrucción y reelaboración de una imagen que se reblandece, desinforma y confunde en su apariencia incompleta.

 

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Carles Congost, A Sense of Wonder. Bòlit Girona.

 

A sense of wonder

Comisario: David Santaeulària

Del 27 de enero al 30 de abril de 2017

Bòlit La Rambla, Sala Fidel Aguilar y Bòlit St Nicolau

 

A sense of wonder (un sentido de la maravilla o la capacidad de maravillarse) es una propuesta expositiva que reúne los trabajos más recientes del artista Carles Congost. Se trata de una coproducción entre el Bòlit, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo. Girona y el Centro de Arte La Panera, Lleida, donde se podrá ver del 18 de mayo al 15 de octubre de 2017. Se presentan cuatro trabajos en vídeo que se pueden interpretar individualmente pero que mantienen muchas conexiones temáticas habituales en la su práctica artística (la música, el mundo del arte, la cultura pop…) o en el modo de formalizarlo (la cuidada puesta en escena y el sentido del humor). En relación con su trayectoria, se constata una sensible evolución en la articulación de los elementos que utiliza y una mayor atención al propio lenguaje cinematográfico. Pervive, por encima de todo, la capacidad de utilizar aspectos cercanos, cotidianos y a menudo asociados a subgéneros, para hacerlos servir de punto de partida y abordar -sin grandilocuencia ni subrayados- aspectos más centrales y genéricos de la condición humana. El autor utiliza una serie de referentes que nos pertenecen para trascenderlos y ver hasta qué punto nos representan o nos explican mejor de lo que imaginábamos. Nos propone, en definitiva, una capacidad de maravillarnos.

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Esborradis, exhibition from Jordi Alraraz

 

Lunes 23 | Enero – Domingo 11 | Junio, 2017

Fundació Vila Casas, Can Framis. Barcelona

Jordi Alcaraz (Calella, 1963) es un creador en el intersticio que separa la poesía visual y la proyección conceptual, con una propuesta de aproximación metafórica al objeto. Alcaraz experimenta con materiales frágiles presos de un cierto lirismo –el agua, el vidrio, el espejo, el libro– para trabajar relaciones de tensión entre la materia y tejer un discurso en torno al volumen, el lenguaje y el tiempo. Su obra, que trasciende el límite entre disciplinas, es un alegato a favor de la obra inacabada y el arte como ficción.

 

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Teresa Solar

Madrid, 1985

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Teresa Solar’s work focus on heterogeneous practices that materialize in audiovisual and sculptural works, in which the languages ​​of the two disciplines connect and interact. However, in recent years, her artistic practice has opted more for drawing and sculpture, with materials such as ceramics or clay, which have been used, since the beginning of humanity and until today, for their insulation properties, resistance and hardness.

 

Based on these elements, Teresa Solar’s work delves into the autobiography, alluding to the daily trips through the subsoil in the Madrid metro or injuries to her own body, to the concern for speech and the organs of phonation, and, at the same time, she reflects on wide-ranging themes, for example related to zoology, geology or space exploration.

 

Along with her interest in the materiality of clay and earth, another figurative language appears in Teresa Solar’s work that moves between the detail of scientific illustrations and the pedagogical representations of Natural History museums, and the brilliant coloring of the fairground attractions, which have resulted in works such as Cabalga, Cabalga, Cabalga or Flotation Line. These are large sculpture installations, which form families with pieces of different sizes, some of them monumental. At the same time, Teresa Solar is an avid sketcher who works with this technique to express her emotions more directly.

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya

Palos, Cuba, 1964

Lives and works in Los Angeles

 

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya works with painting, developing it from the perspective of scientific thought, philosophical, poetic and intellectual.

 

His work brings a permanent concern about experience and representation to light. It is an answer to the surrounding world, especially to nature, the environment of being, and his own perception through ideas that appear over and over again: the child, the sea, the trees, the mountains, the animals, the birds.

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s works exposes the possibilities and limits of representation at the same time. His paintings are a poetic way to explore notions such as confidence, symbolism, displacement, fragmentation, integrity, time, memory and identity.

Fabian Marcaccio

Rosario, Argentina, 1963

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Fabian Marcaccio is one of the pioneers of digital painting. Attempting to redefine the pictorial genre, his work extends the temporal and spatial parameters, and tracks the integration of the hand-made and the machine-made.

 

In the nineties, he worked with composition and digital printing and, later on 3D printing, to create pictorial works that he calls Paintants, a neologism from painting and mutant. Marcaccio considers painting as a constellation of changing content, sometimes rendered as panels, sometimes as 3D configurations, sometimes as animations, and sometimes on an environmental scale.

Lola Lasurt

Barcelona, 1983

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Lola Lasurt’s artistic activity focuses on painting and video and many times also on collaborative processes that confer a universal projection, to her works of a more personal character.

 

The project about the ‘des-time’ can be understood as the analysis and the questioning of a time period, previous to hers. This is one of the main axis of her work, that frequently uses as a starting point elements from the material and aesthetic culture, that reveal behavioral patterns and ideological parameters of a determined era.  

 

Her pieces revolve around the themes of the memory and the oblivion, the nostalgia and the amnesiac need. Lola Lasurt is interested in the historical individual time and its relationship with the guidelines of the hegemonic culture and the construction of collective symbols.

Alicia Kopf

Girona, 1982

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

From the exercise of drawing and writing, Alicia Kopf reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns.

 

The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature, studies that allow her to get closer to subjects as diverse as poor housing or the epic of polar exploration from a position that combines both awe and ironic distance.

 

Alicia Kopf’s work arises from a metaphor, which allows her to perform an analytic exercise that will finally lead to different associations. Thus, in her project Articantàrtic, from the appropriation and the reshaping of graphical and narrative documents, Alicia Kopf turns a historical account into a first person narrative concerning resistance, obsession and the idea of conquest.

Luis Gordillo

Seville, 1934

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Luis Gordillo started his career during the fifties when he travelled to Paris and got acquainted with the European art of the time, in particular with artists such as Wols, Dubuffet, Michaux and Fautrier. In his first works the influence of surrealism and Tàpies can be appreciated to which an early seventies Pop art associated iconography would be incorporated in later years.

 

Gordillo becomes one of the permanently renovating painters of the pictorial language and one of the artists that during the early seventies reincorporate figuration. It’s likewise in that moment, when he starts to work with photographic images, that this, in some way or another, is introduced in the process of creation in his paintings.

 

Both ideas, that of the process and the continuous construction as resource of accumulation, are elements that are permanently present in his work.

Evru / Zush

Barcelona, 2001 (from 1946, Alberto Porta, and from 1968, Zush)

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Alberto Porta adopts the name Zush in 1968 when he consciously initiates the creation of his own world parallel to reality. This world constituted by his artistic work is named “Evrugo Mental State”, which is a State such as a bubble territory.

 

In this state there even exists an alphabet called “asura”, a passport, a flag, ambassadors… His iconography is nourished by images that Evru/Zush has been elaborating from biographic elements: eyes, vital organs, fire, water, etc.

 

From the eighties, Zush incorporates new digital means to his work which boost the interactivity and the relevant role that the spectator assumes. His work aims –according to what he himself has commented in some occasions- to achieve harmony in art, science and mysticism, which would make possible to recover the balance present in childhood.

Victoria Civera

Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955

Lives and works between New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Victoria Civera’s career began in the seventies, working mainly photomontage. Over the next decade she focused on painting, abstract at first, but then introduced figurativism. In the middle of this decade Victoria Civera moves to New York and integrates photography and sculpture to her practice. Her creations undergo a transformation, making them more introspective.

 

Because of the iconography of her work, focused on the feminine universe, and because of her oneiric content, Victoria Civera has achieved a personal language, full of nuances. She moves in between large-scale pieces, in which she uses industrial materials, and suggested and poetic understatement pieces, often incorporating ordinary household objects.

Cabello/Carceller

Helena Cabello (Paris, 1963) and Ana Carceller (Madrid, 1964)

Live and work in Madrid

 

 

Cabello/Carceller’s work is set in a territory from which they question, reflect and/or fracture the roles or stereotypes associated to gender. They understand identity as something built in conflict or in consonance with a social, cultural, political and economic environment. They point at an `I´ that is always found according to the `others´, this idea vertebrates their production.

 

In their works the patterns, which are linked in a static way to either masculine or feminine roles, are revised. In this way, images are subverted in their works along with behavioral codes and attitudes, associated to that which is commonly considered as masculine or feminine.

 

The rereading that Cabello/Carceller’s work forms in the mentioned models, position the spectator facing multiple prejudice, assumed values and contradictions that manage to effectively destabilize a univocal vision of reality.

Alfons Borrell

Barcelona, 1931 – Sabadell, 2020

 

 

Alfons Borrell is one of the most prominent representatives of lyrical abstraction in Catalonia.

 

After attending the studio of Anglada Camarasa and the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Alfons Borrell began his artistic career in the fifties, within figuration at first. His work evolved into abstract expressionism and, already in the sixties, to the gestural painting.

 

In the mid-seventies he developed the style of its own, detached of any label, characterized by a sober chromatism that  is consciously disassociated from the material informality. In his painting, the color is imposed on the form, from a language that waives any reference, craving and seeking restraint and rigor.

Calella, Barcelona, 1963

Lives and works in Calella, Barcelona

 

Jordi Alcaraz’s work is a reflection on volume, artistic language and time through a lyrical handling of materials. An abstraction that is the result of the battle against limitations of format and conventions.

 

His work is based on the classical tradition of painting and sculpture and alters the meaning of the foundations of a real and recognizable object, to new genesis of meaning and continent.

 

Jordi Alcaraz transgresses surfaces and materials, gives unlikely uses to his pieces and redefines the logic of frames and methacrylate, of stones and plasters, of mirrors and woods, of shadows and metals; changing perceptions and conventional treatments.

 

He has done different bibliophile editions such as “El Viatge a Tokushima”, with text by Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja, or “Diorames”, together with Joan Brossa, Alfons Borrell, Perejaume and Jordi Rosés.

Chema Madoz

Madrid, 1958
Lives and works in Madrid

 

Chema Madoz’s work, close to visual poetry, shows a constant inclination towards symbolism, using images that are characterized by a subtle play of paradoxes and metaphors.

 

With regards to the ‘Still Life’ conventions, his photographs show objects that contain “life” and discover a new dimension of meaning through contextualization, relocation or juxtaposition of common and everyday appearances. In this manner, Chema Madoz shapes an imaginary that challenges our credulity in the picture, and in the existence of an intangible reality.

Madrid, 1915 – Galapagar, Madrid, 2007

 

Throughout his career, Pablo Palazuelo developed a very personal form of geometric abstraction linked to esoteric issues, Kabbalah, Eastern philosophy, along with mathematics, physics and scientific thinking.

 

Palazuelo, initially, studied architecture before deciding to devote himself only to painting in 1939. Later, he also ventured into the third dimension, producing sculpture from 1954.

 

In the 1940s, his work was influenced by the abstraction of Paul Klee, but in the early 1950s he began to draw inspiration from his readings of Theosophy and hermetic texts dealing with the connections between numbers, the sacred or the psychic, and the correspondence between sound and color, focusing on the language of geometric forms. For Palazuelo, geometry is at the origin of life and allows a view of hidden structures, potential new forms and the metamorphosis of one form in another.

Barcelona 1954

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

 

 

Josep Riera i Aragó can be described as a visual poet, a sculptor who is equally at ease in the painting studio or in the printmakers workshop. Very early in his artistic development he established a deceivingly simple iconography to surprisingly universal and inescapable results. During the 1980s Riera i Aragó discovers his interest in the deep-sea environment, submarines, airplanes and machines operated by engines. This trace of the machine has since then been a clear thread through his oeuvre. Never repetitive, each “machine” he creates, regardless of the medium, evokes without pathos or condescension, a clear and sympathetic view of humanity. They machines are not only blurring the traditional frontiers between sculpture and painting, finally overlapping the two artforms, it also blurs the space between functional machines with a direct purpose and the life of the objects as art pieces. Riera i Aragó’s work highlights the machines, seen in its own dysfunction, in what is has been created for but never manage to do. His zeppelins, airplanes, ships and submarines must assume their inability to sail or fly. 

 

Besides from Riera i Aragó’s sculptures made in bronze and at times recovered iron, his oeuvre also holds great paintings and works on paper utilizing the same iconography as the sculptures; propellers, engines and machines. Especially his later painting seems to almost mimic or portray his sculptures, creating a close narrative between the two. Riera i Aragó’s pieces are essential to the understanding of some of the most characteristic emblems of our time, the world of machines and artifacts in general. His works speaks paradoxically about the machine, its transience, its capacity for suggestion, on a journey back and forth from real to imaginary space.

Erick Beltrán

Mexico City, 1974

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Erick Beltrán analyzes and reflects on the edition concept and the discourse constructions. He investigates the power that the different graphic means exert in their distribution of information, as well as explicit treatment on different conducts and values.

 

He works with diverse formats as the multiple or the book; he experiments and investigates the link between public art and the diverse graphic languages.

 

The archive, the museum and the library are tools and natural means in their investigation process. A process in which the edition concept focuses all the work, understanding it as the mechanism with which communication through images that create political, economical and cultural discourses in contemporary societies are defined, evaluated, classified and reproduced.

Antoni Muntadas

Barcelona, 1942

Lives and works between Barcelona, New York and Venice.

 

 

Antoni Muntadas’s work has developed from its beginning –early seventies– a constant criticism towards the languages and messages of the media as clear instruments of power.

 

Since the first moment he used the video as useful tool to dissect and make the mechanisms of communications visible, referring to television and the designated `media landscape´. This genuine study and treatment turned him into an early pioneer in the audiovisual artistic field.

 

Likewise, Muntadas has analyzed and questioned the relationships that are established between the public and the private through his video works, photographs and multimedia installations; it’s from the early nineties that he incorporates internet to this list.

 

Also, since the 90s, he initiates new kinds of long-term. In each of these projects a principal concept is developed, which extends through different stages and contexts.

Perejaume

Sant Pol de Mar, 1957

Lives and works in Sant Pol de Mar

 

 

Perejaume started to exhibit his work during the late seventies and since then he has been developing it in parallel, either in visual disciplines or in literary extension.

 

The landscape is a recurring subject analyzed and explored in his work, retaking and reevaluating the presence it has had most of all, in its literary and visual production. Through this approach, his relationship with the landscape is examined from diverse points of view none of which are exempt of irony. Points of view that are shaped through painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video or the intervention on the natural environment itself.

 

For Perejaume, man is part of the landscape, he isn’t an outsider to it and he is yet another agent in its conformation and evolution, as if the geologic time would have been accelerated.

Javier Peñafiel

Zaragoza, 1964

Lives and works in Mallorca

 

 

Javier Peñafiel’s work, drawings, videos, texts and sculptures make up a linguistic system parallel to a reality to which he is unconnected.

 

All through his career, Javier Peñafiel has built up a universe inhabited by characters; by sentences that work autonomously, such as phrases that have the duty to bother the quiet and routine based use of the language by the spectator; or videos where diverse elements are combined in the shape of tableaux, sharing a space but keeping at the same time their identity separate.

 

The works of Javier Peñafiel show the necessity and the difficulty in direct communication. His works investigate the double identity – as obstacle and as a bridge- that the language represents in such communication.

Fernando Prats

Santiago de Chile, 1967

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

In his work Fernando Prats “paints” or, we’d rather say, recreates nature; he deals with registering tracks, making the invisible visible, giving voice and image to what was present but kept unnoticed.

 

Using seismographs, traces, photographs, videos… he registers the beat of different realities on smoked supports, from the flight of birds to the wild jet of a geyser, the deep coal of mines or the powerful waves that break against the cliff. Thus, Fernando Prats holds an unorthodox relationship with painting, both for the choice of his instruments and for the intervention of chance.

 

His work is formalized in actions which himself registers, that show the creative processes intrinsic to his work. Fernando Prats paintings are time-objects, as they condense in their finished form a story, the one of its creation, whose times often have nothing to do with the ones of the artist, but with the natural rhythms.

Caio Reisewitz

São Paulo, 1967

Lives and works in São Paulo

 

 

The register of a high-speed changing nature is one of the subjects that articulates Caio Reisewitz’s photographic work and, in this sense, his images are placed in a tradition in which photographic means are witnesses and capture ephemeral realities. The activity of man on the planet, and in certain areas in particular, radically modifies the appearance of the landscape.

 

His photographs, which are mostly large format, are characterized by their frontality and by a spectacular clarity that shows an exuberant nature and an unreal utopian beauty. On one occasion he himself commented: ‘sometimes these images don’t seem real, utopian they are, but they are true, it is the pure reality’.

Ràfols Casamada

Barcelona, 1923-2009

 

 

Besides his long pictorial career which has boosted him internationally, Albert Ràfols Casamada has another creative side as a literary poet. It is of no surprise that his multidisciplinary character attracts him to teaching and pedagogy in the world of fine Art.

 

In his painting, modernity’s fragile equilibrium has been developed and maintained: his work, of classical origin, incorporates at the same time the legacy of the avant-gardes.

 

During the early seventies he abandoned figuration to work in the field of abstract painting that would take him, during the eighties and nineties, to develop a more lyrical abstraction. This process would lead to what is his most recognized stage in his artistic career.

 

On the other hand, Ràfols Casamada has had a fundamental role in the renewal of the arts teaching in Spain being the founding member of the Eina School in Barcelona in 1967.

Julião Sarmento

Lisbon, 1948- Estoril, 2021

 

 

From the early seventies, Julião Sarmento has explored the possibilities of painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. There is a process of suggestive hiding in his works that situates the spectator not only as an observer but also as a participant of his narrative.

 

The woman is a recurring motive in his works and from it he elaborates concepts linked to sexuality, desire or seduction. The relationships he evokes, on latent tension, violence, obsession or mystery, are obtained from a meticulous dynamic between the participating agents in the physical space, in the case of installations, or in the edition, in case of films and videos. The resulting works unleash all the detached intrigue of the images in constant suspense and tension.