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.