Tag Archives: photographer

Opening 16.01, 19h

Exhibition 17.01 – 30.05.2020

 

 

On Thursday January 16, we will open the seventh exhibition of Chema Madoz at the Galeria Joan Prats. We will present recent works made between 2012 and 2018.

 

The black and white photographs by Chema Madoz are characterized by their sharpness and fineness. Simple objects of everyday life appear in his pictures. The photographer has manipulated them, often combining two objects, looking for associations or paradoxes. These sculptures created by the artist are born only to be photographed, always with natural light. The change of scale and the absence of color allow us to establish a distance and at the same time distort reality, questioning ideas such as the true and the possible.

 

In the images of Chema Madoz, therefore, two points of view converge, the one from the photographer himself and the one from the viewer, who faces photography from the same place from where he faced the object. In the words of Chema Madoz, he is interested in “the idea of finding, discovering and perceiving the mystery in everyday life.” At the same time, the artist conceives reality as an exercise of reading, and with a cold look, he documents the destruction of its rules through photography.

 

All the photographs are printed on baryta paper and sulfide toned.

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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Caio Reisewitz Territorio Común Mamm

 22.05 – 11.11.2019 

MAMM, Medellín, Colombia

 

Territorio común. Nuevas incorporaciones a la Colección MAMM incluye alrededor de cincuenta obras que dan algunas luces sobre el devenir del arte reciente en Colombia y más allá. Predomina la pintura aunque la instalación y el video también están presentes de manera decisiva. Más que sugerir temas o preocupaciones específicas, la exposición es un vistazo a los nuevos derroteros de la Colección del Museo y a algunas líneas de trabajo que los últimos años han abierto o consolidado.

 

Los últimos diez años han implicado una transformación profunda para el Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. Primero, con su llegada al edificio Talleres Robledo en Ciudad del Río en 2009 y, posteriormente, con la apertura del edificio Expansión en septiembre de 2015. Paralelamente –o quizás de manera un poco adelantada respecto a estos aspectos más visibles– el MAMM introducía una serie de cambios y reformulaciones de su proyecto museológico y cultural para Medellín y el país.

Poco a poco, este crecía y se modificaba hasta convertirse en el programa de exposiciones locales nacionales e internacionales, programas educativos y académicos, cine, una sala de estudio para la comunidad, etc., que conforman el Museo de hoy. Durante estos años también la Colección del Museo se ha nutrido con obras que reflejan tanto los cambios que la institución ha vivido como la programación que le ha dado vida.

 

 La Colección MAMM surge desde la fundación de la institución como fondo patrimonial con el que soportar la creación de la figura legal del Museo y también como acervo que permitiera la conservación, investigación y difusión del arte antioqueño y colombiano moderno y contemporáneo. Por la manera en que los orígenes de la institución están vinculados con la creación de la Colección podemos decir hoy que este es una parte intrínseca de su surgimiento y consolidación. Así, la Colección MAMM se presenta no sólo como un recorrido por el arte Antioqueño y Colombiano de la segunda mitad del siglo XX y lo que va del XXI sino, de manera significativa, como memoria institucional y apuesta programática.

 

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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

Hannah Collins

London, 1956

Lives and works between London and Níjar (Almería, Spain)

 

 

Hannah Collins is one of the pioneer artists in the use of the large format in the photographic discipline. She became known in the international scene during the early nineties.

 

The size of her works is often monumental, however the portrayed theme is often seemingly close to the spectator, incorporating a reflection around the fleetingness of present time and its survival through the memory of places.

 

From 2000, Hannah Collins began to introduce film and video often projected over multiple screens incorporating constructed musical soundtracks. She has maintained a performative element in her work and has expanded her interest in those people and places who inhabit the limit or margins of society and in the future of the human species. Her still images are often located between documentation and precise acted performance. Migration and modern attempts to improve our vision of the future have been subjects in recent works including The Fertile Forest (2015) a work made in the Colombian Amazon, I will make up a Song (2018) and The Earth Beneath My Feet (2022).

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.

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.

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’.

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.