Tag Archives: exhibition

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.

Parar la fresca

Capítol I: Parar la fresca

Inauguració: 18-19 de juny. Exposició fins al 3 d’agost

c/ Empordà, 10, Fonteta, Girona

 

Joan Brossa, Hannah Collins, Anne-Lise Coste, Bernat Daviu, Enric Farrés Duran, Hernández Pijuan, Marine Hugonnier, Chema Madoz, Josep Maynou, Ana Mendieta, Jordi Mitjà, Luna Paiva, Perejaume, Wilfredo Prieto, Antoni Tàpies, Rosa Tharrats

 __

 

Capítol II: Estar a la lluna

Inauguració: 7 d’agost. Exposició fins al 26 de setembre

 

Mari Eastman, Joana Escoval, Alicia Kopf, Jordi Mitjà, Perejaume, Joan Ponç, Julião Sarmento, Teresa Solar, Antoni Tapies, Aldo Urbano, Juan Uslé, Richard Wentworth

 

_____

[CAT]

 

Presentem un projecte conjunt de Bombon, Galeria Joan Prats i NoguerasBlanchard, de juny a setembre, a Fonteta, un petit poble de l’Empordà.

 

L’exposició, concebuda en dos capítols que s’inauguraran el 18-19 de juny i el 7 d’agost, reuneix artistes de les tres galeries i de diferents generacions, en una proposta que parteix del concepte empordanès Parar la Fresca (Prendre la fresca), descrit per Josep Pla en el llibre “Les Hores”.

 

Parar la fresca, com diu Pla, és el costum estival de treure la cadira al carrer o al terrat quan el sol comença a caure i, així, passar l’estona. Parar la fresca té pretensions modestes, bàsicament fer una becaina sota el firmament, ignorant la meravella que el cel ens ofereix, els sons que emanen del vesprejar, de la calor estival. Segons argumenta Pla, no hi ha res més plaent ni amable que adormir-se prenent la fresca crepuscular. Però, i què succeeix si hom no té el son fàcil?

 

A partir d’aquest interrogant, s’han seleccionat obres d’artistes que transiten temes com la naturalesa, el paisatge, el temps, la contemplació, l’univers … I s’han dividit en dos moments: Parar la fresca i Estar a la lluna, dos capítols d’una mateixa exposició amb artistes com Antoni Tàpies, Ana Mendieta, Joan Brossa, Hernández Pijuan, Rosa Tharrats, Perejaume, Teresa Solar, Jordi Mitjà, Aldo Urbano, Chema Madoz, Mari Eastman, Enric Farrés Duran, Wilfredo Prieto o Juan Uslé… entre d’altres. Així mateix, es realitzaran accions específiques d’alguns dels artistes vinculats a l’Empordà.

 

En paraules de Pla, “la volta del cel invita, segons diuen, a pensar. És cert. Però a pensar què?” Conclou el cèlebre empordanès que “les persones que posseeixen el sentit del ridícul pensen, davant del firmament, que no saben res de res”.

 

_____

[CAST]

 

Presentamos un proyecto conjunto de Bombon, Joan Prats y NoguerasBlanchard, de junio a septiembre en Fonteta, un pequeño pueblo del Empordà.

 

La exposición, concebida en dos capítulos que se inaugurarán el 18-19 de junio y el 7 de agosto, reúne artistas de las tres galerías y de diferentes generaciones, en una propuesta que parte del concepto ampurdanés Parar la fresca’ (Tomar el fresco), descrito por Josep Pla en el libro “Las Horas”.

 

Parar la fresca, como dice Pla, es la costumbre estival de sacar la silla a la calle o a la azotea cuando el sol empieza a caer y, así, pasar el rato. ‘Parar la fresca’ tiene pretensiones modestas, básicamente echar una cabezada bajo el firmamento, ignorando la maravilla que el cielo nos ofrece, los sonidos que emanan del atardecer, del calor estival. Según argumenta Pla, no hay nada más placentero ni amable que dormirse tomando el fresco crepuscular. Pero, ¿y qué sucede si uno no tiene el sueño fácil?

 

A partir de este interrogante, se han seleccionado obras de artistas que transitan temas como la naturaleza, el paisaje, el tiempo, la contemplación, el universo… Y se han dividido en dos momentos: Parar la fresca y Estar a la lluna, dos capítulos de una misma exposición con artistas como Antoni Tàpies, Ana Mendieta, Joan Brossa, Hernández Pijuan, Rosa Tharrats, Perejaume, Teresa Solar, Jordi Mitjà, Aldo Urbano, Chema Madoz, Mari Eastman, Enric Farrés Duran, Wilfredo Prieto o Juan Uslé… entre otros. Así mismo, se realizarán acciones específicas de algunos de los artistas vinculados al Empordà.

 

En palabras de Pla, “la bóveda celeste invita, según dicen, a pensar. Es cierto. Pero, ¿a pensar en qué?” Concluye el célebre ampurdanés que “las personas que poseen sentido del ridículo piensan, ante el firmamento, que no saben nada de nada”.

  

_____

[ENG]

 

We’re delighted to present a joint project by Bombon, Galeria Joan Prats and NoguerasBlanchard, from June to September, in Fonteta, a small village in the Emporda region.

 

 

The exhibition, conceived in two chapters (the first opening June 19th and the second August 7th) brings together artists from three different generations. The proposal begins with a concept from the Emporda Parar la fresca (to take in fresh air) described by Josep Pla in the book “Las Horas”. 

 

Parar la fresca, as Pla states, is the summer habit of taking a chair out into the street, or up onto a rooftop as the sun begins to fall and simply letting time pass. Parar la fresca has modest intentions, to ignore the heavens, to be blissfully unaware of what the sky offers us whilst sounds flow from the sunset and the summer heat. As Pla argues, there is nothing more pleasurable or kind than falling asleep in the fresh twilight. But what if one does not fall sleep easily? 

 

Taking this question as a point of departure, works have been selected by artists addressing topics such as nature, landscape, time, contemplation, and the universe. They have been divided into two moments: Parar la fresca and Estar a la lluna. Two chapters of the same exhibition with artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Ana Mendieta, Joan Brossa, Hernández Pijuan, Rosa Tharrats, Perejaume, Teresa Solar, Jordi Mitjà, Aldo Urbano, Chema Madoz, Mari Eastman, Enric Farrés Duran, Wilfredo Prieto o Juan Uslé… amongst others. In addition, specific actions will be carried out by some of the artists linked to the Emporda.

 

In Pla’s words, “The vast sky dome, they say, invites us to think. That is true. But think about what?” The renowned Emporda author concludes that “people who have a sense of ridicule think, before the heavens, that they know nothing at all.”

 

On peut mourir d'être immortel

On peut mourir d’être immortel: Teresa Solar >< Luca Vanello

 

o v project room, Brussels

 

13.02 — 03.04.2021

 

 

OV Project is pleased to present ‘OV 26 – On peut mourir d’être immortel’, a dialogue between the works of Teresa Solar and Luca Vanello.

 

With a special interest for natural materials — clay for Solar and plants for Vanello —, these two artists proceed to various manipulations, creating personal narratives through their sculptural works. These narratives speak directly to the idea of evolution, of development. We witness the division of the subject, between what is a product of Nature and what is manufactured. As an echo to nowadays evolutions — where sciences focus on enhancement, whether it is nature enhancement or human enhancement —, the works of Teresa Solar and Luca Vanello, question our relationship to corporeality and bring new perspectives to explore the discourses surrounding it.

 

 

+ info

sesin melodim, seslerin yankım benim (tu voz es mi sonido es tu ruido es mi eco)

 

MIND the GAP, Hamburgo

21.10 – 13.12.2020

 

Instalación sonora de Annika Kahrs en colaboración con el músico Derya Yildirim.

 

 

 

La base de la instalación de sonido de 7 canales son las entrevistas que Kahrs y Yıldırım realizaron con los miembros de la familia de Yıldırım, sus padres, hermanos y primos, en Hamburgo. En las respectivas conversaciones se intercambiaron historias personales, específicamente preguntado sobre recuerdos sonoros y personalidad acústica. Estos se tradujeron luego en una compleja instalación de sonido en el estudio de sonido. La música se entiende aquí como una puesta en escena portadora de la memoria y un vínculo intergeneracional: qué canciones juegan un papel importante dentro de la familia, se transmiten a las siguientes generaciones y se reinterpretan, qué sonidos recuerdan los padres de su infancia en Sivas (Turquía), o los hermanos en Hamburgo.

 

sesin melodim, seslerin yankım benim (tu voz es mi sonido es tu ruido es mi eco) invita a los visitantes a acercarse a estos pensamientos y a escuchar el retrato de la familia de una manera temporalmente lineal y espacialmente vertical: cada piso representa a un miembro de la familia.

 

 

+ info

Si la dècada de 1980 va representar a Europa un retorn a l’ordre, a la reivindicació d’una certa formalitat en l’art, als formats convencionals de la pintura i l’escultura àmpliament acceptats pel mercat, la de 1990 va reprendre bona part de les experiències conceptuals de dècades anteriors. D’aquesta manera, es van recuperar pràctiques relacionades amb el cos humà que conjuntament anomenem art d’acció. A l’Estat espanyol, aquestes pràctiques encara van tenir més rellevància, amb iniciatives múltiples que han exercit un immens impacte en l’art fins avui dia. Sovint aquest art d’acció s’expressava en forma de performances ‒que acostumaven a circular en àmbits molt restringits, en festivals o trobades‒ i la seva expressió més heterogènia, el que anomenem performativitat.

 

A través de diversos nodes, Acció recorrerà aquesta època i en rastrejarà algunes de les obres fonamentals. A més, inclourà documentació i material audiovisual majoritàriament inèdit que recupera aquelles experiències. El resultat és una exposició densa, amb múltiples extensions històriques i contemporànies, que ajudarà a interpretar d’una manera molt més precisa l’art del nostre temps.

 

Exposició comissariada per Ferran Barenblit, amb obres de Cabello/Carceller, entre d’altres.

 

+ info

No brilho da pele, exhibition by Julião Sarmento at Museu de Aveiro / Santa Joana, Portugal.

 

July 15 – September 27, 2020

 

Exhibition organized by the Museums of Aveiro in partnership with the Serralves Foundation – Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Joana Valsassina.

 

 

Selection of works by Julião Sarmento (Lisbon, 1948) that illustrate different approaches to themes such as desire, voyeurism and violence, central to the artist’s practice.

 

The exhibition includes works from the 1970s to the present, covering different supports worked by the artist throughout his career, such as painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and installation. Exploring ambiguous territories associated with gestures of seduction and transgression, Julião Sarmento’s work create a network of references to cinema, literature, popular culture, everyday episodes and his own work.

 

+ info

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.

 

 

+ info

 

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.

SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin

Exhibition 23.3 – 6.5.2018

Opening 23.3. 2018, 7pm


Performance Annika Kahrs the lord loves changes, it‘s one of his greatest delusions, 2018 


24.3.2018, 9pm



 

With: Paolo Bottarelli, Raven Chacon, Tanka Fonta, Malak Helmy, Hassan Khan, Annika Kahrs, Pungwe (Robert Machiri and Memory Biwa), The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun), Barthélémy Toguo

 

We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal. Of, with, towards, on Julius Eastman is an exhibition, a program of performances, concerts and lectures as well as an upcoming publication that deliberate around concepts beyond the predominantly Western musicological format of the tonal or harmonic. The project looks at the work of the African American composer, musician and performer Julius Eastman beyond the framework of what is today understood as minimalist music, within a larger, always gross and ever-growing understanding of it—i.e. conceptually and geo-contextually. Together with musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers we aim to explore a non-linear genealogy of Eastman’s practice and his cultural, political and social weight while situating his work within a broader rhizomatic relation of musical epistemologies and practices.

 

For the project, new substantial artworks and musical pieces have been commissioned and will be world-premiered in Berlin. These include a filmic work and performance by Annika Kahrs.

 

+ info

Manila

MCAD Museum of Contemporary Art & Design, Manila

13.07 – 10.09.2017

 

 

The exhibition Re-enactments takes up the issue of situations, whether constructed, instruction-based, document-orientated activities, or those positioned as gestures, within the parameters of a traditional exhibition format.

 

Featuring works from: Fracis Alÿs, Yason Banal, Erick Beltrán, Dora García, Liz Magic Laser, Michelle Lopez, Gabriella Mangano, and Silvana Mangano

 

+ info

Kunsthalle Krems, Austria

02.07 – 05.11.2017

 

In Modernism, abstraction is regarded as one of the most significant formal articulations and is particularly linked to painting. The consistent analysis of the medium up to the zero point in the avant-garde of the 1910s followed a steady resurgence of non-representational painting, especially in abstract expressionism, in informal and minimal art Painting and the creative authority, which was countered with sensuality and intuition in the postmodern phase from the 1980s onwards.

The exhibition Abstract Painting Now! Will focus on the current international situation of the non-figurative panel painting with about sixty artistic positions and will fan out the wide field of a still significant painter’s practice. The historical basis of the show is the development following Abstract Expressionism, which was supported above all by Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. The former, after a period of agony, in which his gray colorings emerged, turned to the beautiful, seemingly expressive. The latter used abstraction as an ironic paraphrase, commenting on the veracity of the brush stroke as a mark of the artistic self. 

 

+ info

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

José María Sicilia

Madrid, 1954

 

 

José María Sicilia was one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties who identified himself with the young generation of artists that at the beginning of that decade, took up the practice of a `material´ perspective in painting

 

From 1985, Sicilia initiates a new series of works on the subject of flowers, by which he is specially recognized in Spain. This new thematic development would take him deeper in an investigation focused in the analysis of the shape, the construction of space and the structure of light.

 

In the abstract painting that this artist has developed lately, the use of wax acquires a main role for its possibilities of dialogue with light and the creation of spaces in the pictorial surface.