Tag Archives: painting

The Rose Garden

The Rose Garden. ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA

 

February 16 – March 12, 2022

 

UTA Artist Space.

403 Foothill Road, Beverly Hills, CA

 

 

 

OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, February 16, 6-8PM

 

 

UTA Artist Space and Unit London are pleased to announce a new immersive environment by the celebrated Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. The Rose Garden ambitiously brings together new paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, garments, and writing, inviting viewers to consider the self—both its promise and its threat—through the mystical divination of memory.

 

 

 

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

 

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (from Four Quartets)

 

 

 

For over two decades, Martínez Celaya has explored the limitless connections between art, literature, philosophy, and science through his practice. In this new and multifaceted body of work, the artist uses T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as an entry point to exploring our collective memory—something broader, more permanent, and more irreparable than individual memory, and which belongs to us all. 

 

In this exhibition, as in past projects, Martínez Celaya again concerns himself with existential hunger, crisis, chaos, order, time, redemption, reality, and love—here tied together by the thread of Eliot’s words. As visitors enter UTA Artist Space’s main gallery, they will encounter Eliot’s poem written at their feet, and a series of large paintings depicting ice, sea, and fire, urging a meditation on the ever-changing, complicated nature of time and memory.

 

All three of UTA Artist Space’s galleries will be assumed by Martínez Celaya’s immersive environments, including a room of tears overlooked by a blood moon, photographs of gardens and bodies, a burnt figure on a seat of roses, a garment worn by love champions, and many other luminous chunks mined from life. Viewed collectively, these works and the artist’s concurrent solo exhibitions at Los Angeles museums—at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; USC Fisher Museum of Art; and Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library—remind us of the power art has to change our perceptions of the world and of our inner selves.

 

 

 

+ info

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.

Untitled (Terrace), 2017. Detail

Opening Thursday, September 5, 5.30 – 8.30pm

Exhibition 05/09 – 04/10/2019

Talk with Janosch Jauch and curators Gabriel Virgilio Luciani + Gisela Chillida: Friday 06/09, 7pm

 

 

As part of artnou, Galeria Joan Prats presents the work by Janosch Jauch (1985, Karlsruhe, Germany).

 

Janosch Jauch‘s works are developed through the process of bringing together photographic images of installations, digital interventions, and physical surfaces using photographic silver emulsion. This layering leads to a symbiosis of all of these production steps and thus to a work that, despite its diverse forms and materials, has become an image that is equally determined by all the techniques that went into its formation.

 

The delimitation of his work in the sense of production aesthetics accounts for a large portion of his intermedia art, which has as its central focus the experience of the open-ended piece. His works also project us to a universe where the artificial interferes with the natural.

 

 

 

Janosch Jauch (1985, Karlsruhe, Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf, where he has been graduated in sculpture and painting at the Kunstakademie (2014), under the teaching of Georg Herold, Andreas Gursky and Ludger Schwarte.

 

He has shown his work at Bistrot21 (2018, Leipzig), Kunsthaus Essen (2019), Bistrot21 (2018, Leipzig), Storage Capacité (2018, Berlin), Swab (2018, Barcelona), Espositivo (2018, Madrid), Museum Kunstpalast (2013, Düsseldorf), among other places.

 

 

To provide you with more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

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.

Hernández Pijuan

Barcelona, 1931-2005

 

 

Joan Hernández Pijuan started painting during the sixties with a style related to expressionism. Nevertheless, during the seventies the empty space started gaining prominence in his paintings such as the geometrical figures. As he mentioned himself, `the space´ became the objective of his work; `I’d say that a constant preoccupation is, and has been finding a space as total protagonist of the canvass. (…) A space as a living element and not as a surface upon which one draws or places himself.´

 

The landscape of his childhood in the town of Folquer have become a pictorial motive in his adult age: Hernández Pijuan resorts to a memory exercise to recreate it synthetically in his painting.

 

The objective of this painter was never to achieve a descriptive or narrative painting, but to emphasize through the monochrome the pictorial technique itself.

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.

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.

Bucharest, Romania, 1955

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Lydia Dona’s paintings hold many references to the city and the urban environment. So through tubes, screws and other objects that she superimposes to the colour stain, an enormous mechanism without human presence is revealed.

 

The surface of her paintings may recall the American abstract legacy of Pollock or Clyfford – Though the colours drift apart by their luminosity- that is juxtaposed to the mechanic images of the vanguards.

 

Lydia Dona maintains in her work the permanent conflict between urban abstractions with its noisy rhythm and the micro cosmos that makes it possible.

Palma Mallorca, 1962

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Macias has his roots in the so-called post-pop movement in Spain, depicting vividly colorful, abstract geometry. His early work can be read as a reformulation or assimilation of existing language from the culture of mass media. His works absorbs the formal pieces of an identifiable visual system, to bring its essential typologies together in a generic expression. They can be read as a semi-abstract reduction of the forms of everyday life. Several of Macias’ works apply the technique of interlocking figure and background, leading to the creation of double images, often not visible at first.

 

In recent years, Macias has been portraying imaginative characters in renderings that are still very colorful, but on the contrary carry grotesque and haunting features. They seem like they are dissolving, falling apart, but at the same time they convey their revulsion with an almost humoristic outrageousness; simple and iconographic, but also comic and personal.

 

Macias is interested in the artists role in fixing the forms of contemporary culture in the works; drawing attention to the painting, in his 2D- like figuration in his early days and pointing the mirror back towards the public in his confronting portraits.

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.

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.