Tag Archives: sculpture

Camila Cañeque

On May 26, we will open Hole In The Ground, a collective exhibition that brings together works by Cabrita, Camila Cañeque, Hannah Collins, Pablo del Pozo, Mercedes Pimiento and Fernando Prats.

 

The title of the exhibition, inspired by a David Bowie song, refers to the main theme around the displayed pieces, the concept of territory and its materiality. Some of the works deal with the ways of representing the ground, understood as horizontality, both in nature and in the urban environment. In this way, human activity is put in the spotlight, evidencing aspects such as belonging to a territory, the memory of a place or exploitation of the soil and its impact.

 

While some of the presented works speak of very specific places, others refer to the material that we step on when walking. Cabrita, in his work Fingerprints, raises a horizontal plane to the wall, thus turning a simple board, a humble material that was surely used as a work surface in his studio, into a testimony of his artistic activity. The artist offers us a new look at an everyday object and also a review of the place of creation.

 

Camila Cañeque’s work ground on ground on ground shows accumulations of historical layers through grounds. The artist’s work addresses passivity and, in this installation, she uses the notion of the in-between, creating a space that is neither above nor below, before nor after.

 

Hannah Collins’ work Nomad places emphasis on the surface, on skin, on the outside, signaling the artist’s interest in boundaries – most specifically of the body.  With this portrait of a character whose face remain hidden, the artist allows us to participate through the free interpretation of the image. The artist deals with the historical, the social and the political through images of everyday scene, such as Floor of dreams. This work, made in La Mina, is part of an extensive project by the artist focused on this neighbourhood inhabited mainly by the gypsy community in Barcelona.

 

In the work of Pablo del Pozo, interest in the territory is a recurring theme. In Tierra rojiza, the artist uses the pig as a symbol of his region of origin, to create a materiality that refers to the stereotyped vision of Extremadura as an arid and dry landscape.

 

Mercedes Pimiento’s work is characterized by making visible all the material culture that nourishes our society but which we try to hide, turning into sculptures the structures that are hidden in architecture, such as pipes, cables and canals, using organic or artificial materials.

 

Fernando Prats is interested in the territory of Chile and South America and its representation through historical or reinterpreted maps. In Territorio silenciado #2, he proposes a critical view of a continent condemned to be endlessly exploited. In Affatus, on the other hand, the canvas becomes the territory of creation where, subverting the traditional gesture of the painter, the worms have left their own mark. We also present an unreleased video, Zonificación, accompanied by a work on paper, composed from the projection of the recorded action, and which establishes a dialogue with the spiral staircase of the Macba, in a centrifugal movement that is access, exit, ascend and descend, the body and the architecture in connection and amplification with the Richard Meier building.

 

 

Cabrita (Lisbon, 1956) lives and works in Lisbon. His work has received international recognition and has been crucial to the understanding of sculpture since the mid-eighties. In recent years he has had solo exhibitions at CAC Malaga, Mudam Luxembourg, CGAC Santiago de Compostela, Museo Serralves Porto, Palazzo Molina de Cartagena, Mexico, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Galeria Arte Moderna e Contemporânea, Lisbon, MAXXI Rome, The Arts Club of Chicago and Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, France. He has participated in important international exhibitions, such as Documenta IX in Kassel (1992), the 21st and 24th São Paulo Biennial (1994 and 1998), the Venice Biennial (in 1997, in 2003 representing Portugal and in 2013) and the 10th Lyon Biennial (2009). He is currently showing the sculptural installation Les Trois Grâces, at Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, and an installation entitled Field at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Camila Cañeque (Barcelona, 1984) explores in different ways the theme of resistance to progress through performance, sound, objects, installations and writing. She has exhibited in several art centres in Barcelona such as La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Blue Project Foundation, Fabra i Coats, Caixaforum, Museo Lázaro Galdiano, in Madrid and at the Queens Museum of Art, New York. She was a finalist for the Miquel Casablancas Prize and participated in residencies at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, Fabra i Coats, Barcelona, Nida Art Colony, Lithuania, ZKU, Berlin, Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro, among others.

Hannah Collins (London, 1956). Currently lives between London and Almeria. Between 1989 and 2010, she lived in Barcelona, exhibiting at Galeria Joan Prats since 1992. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, was nominated for the 1993 Turner Prize, and received the 2015 SPECTRUM International Photography Prize, including exhibitions at Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Camden Art Centre in London and Baltic Centre in Newcastle. Among other museums and art centres, she has exhibited at SFMOMA, San Francisco; 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; Fundación La Caixa, Madrid and Barcelona; La Laboral, Gijón; Artium, Vitoria; CAC, Málaga.

Pablo del Pozo (Badajoz, 1994) lives and works in Barcelona. Graduated in Fine Arts at the Universitat de Barcelona, he was selected in the Biennial of Valls and has won the Guasch-Coranty Award, participating in the exhibition at the Centre Tecla Sala, in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat. He also participated in the Biennial Jeune Création Européenne with exhibitions in museums in various European cities. He has received the creation award of the Sala d’Art Jove de la Generalitat de Catalunya, exhibiting there in 2018. He was nominated for the Miquel Casablancas Prize, and in 2019 he exhibited individually at the Arranz Bravo Foundation in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Mercedes Pimiento (Seville, 1990) lives and works in Barcelona, where she is pursuing a doctorate in Fine Arts. With a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Sevilla and a Master’s Degree in Artistic Production and Research from the Universitat de Barcelona, she has been selected for programs and grants such as INJUVE, the Madrid Community Training Program – Open Studio, the Kiosko Project of the José Guerrero Centre, the Guasch Coranty Foundation Grant for artistic creation, the Sant Andreu Contemporani residency program, or the Iniciarte Program. She has exhibited in museums and art centres such as Centre Tecla Sala in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, CAAC Seville, Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Fundación Naturgy in A Coruña, Centro José Guerrero in Granada, among others.

Fernando Prats (Santiago de Chile, 1967) has lived and worked in Barcelona since 1990. His work is known for the actions undertaken mostly in Chile, among them Gran Sur, Isla Elefante, Antarctica, Acción Lota, Géiser del Tatio, Salar de Atacama, Mina a Rajo Abierto o Congelación, Collins Glacier and Chilean Antarctica. He has participated in exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale; Mediations Biennale, Poznan; Biennial of the Canary Islands, Chile Triennial, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile. He has significant works in the public space of Chile and a work commissioned by Barcelona. He is currently presenting the solo exhibition Aun tendría que haber luciérnagas, at Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria, Museo Nacional de Bogotá.

FIELD, Cabrita

CHIESA DI SAN FANTIN

VENEZIA 22.4.– 30.9.2022

 

 

On the occasion of the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Cabrita is presenting Field, a large-scale sculpture which will dominate the vast interior of Chiesa di San Fantin in Venice.

 

 

This work consists of an indeterminate grid of steel platforms which evoke the passerelle used during acqua alta conditions in the city.

 

Complete within its boundaries, a multitude of uniform LED light tubes burn steadily on these platforms, underneath the occlusion of debris that appears to have rained down from above.

 

 

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Future Generation Art Prize 2021

September 25, 2021 – February 27, 2022

PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine)

 

 

On September 25, 2021 the PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) will present an exhibition of the 21 shortlisted artists for the 6th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize. The show will focus on the presentation of newly produced works giving a remarkable view on the most actual artistic positions of a next generation of artists. Established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in 2009, the Future Generation Art Prize is a biannual global contemporary art prize to discover, recognize and give long-term support to a future generation of artists all over the world.

 

 

The shortlist of the Future Generation Art Prize 2017 includes: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (33, UK), Wendimagegn Belete (34, Ethiopia), Minia Biabiany (32, Guadeloupe), Aziz Hazara (28, Afghanistan), Ho Rui An (29, Singapore), Agata Ingarden (26, Poland), Rindon Johnson (30, United States), Bronwyn Katz (26, South Africa), Lap-See Lam (30, Sweden), Mire Lee (32, South Korea), Paul Maheke (35, France), Lindsey Mendick (32, United Kingdom), Henrike Naumann (35, Germany), Pedro Neves Marques (35, Portugal), Frida Orupabo (34, Norway), Andres Pereira Paz (33, Bolivia), Teresa Solar (35, Spain), Trevor Yeung (32, China), and artist collectives Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff (USA), Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey (Ukraine), and Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings (UK).

 

The collective Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey was included to the shortlist as the winner of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020 – a national contemporary art prize awarded to young Ukrainian artists up to the age of 35.

 

All other artists were chosen by an international selection committee, which includes: Justine Ludwig, curator at Creative Time in NY; Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, researcher and curator; Daniel Muzyczuk, head of the Modern Art Department at Museum Sztuki in Lodz; Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, curator CCA Lagos; Jeppe Ugelvig, critic and curator; Zoe Whitley, director Chiesenhalе; June Yap, Director curatorial, programmes and publications Singapore Art Museum.

 

 

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Teresa Solar

3D Virtual Tour

October 27 at 7:00 p.m. Guided visit by Olivier COLLET

Limited capacity. RSVP at galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

 

 

During the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, we present Teresa Solar’s second solo exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, in which we will show recent sculptures and drawings.

 

 

Teresa Solar. Time of worms, or the infinite powers of the subsoil

 

Close your eyes. Imagine how these, like two marbles, turn inwards, and fall. They fall down inside your body like two rubber balls, bouncing off the walls of your entrails, your organs, your orifices. Sometimes they slide fast, others are slowed down by the viscosity or some cavity they find; But they are falling, falling, falling. Submerged in that inner darkness, your eyes begin to update their perceptual form, expanding their visual sensorium, that is, seeing-touching, seeing-feeling, seeing-falling.

 

They fall even beyond your body, crossing the ground you step on, entering the thousand layers of earth, stones, remains, of constructions, structures, and times that crowd the subsoil. They move agile through these strata, at times stopping in gaps here and there, seeing without seeing in the blackness that reigns. The deeper they go, and the more they get muddy in that telluric density, the operative divisions of the objective world dissolve to give way to an undifferentiated materiality, full of powers. A sort of dry sea, where they rest in a stagnant, almost rotten time, the fossils of many possible futures.

 

How is this haptic image perceived by your eyes? How is this chronic time that they reveal? Perhaps the pieces that Teresa Solar presents in this exhibition, El tiempo de las lombrices (Time of Worms), seek precisely this: to show us an experiential image of what is unknown and hidden that we step on, that we walk through, and that inhabits us. It is not a pristine and objective image, like the cut of an engineer or surgeon, but rather a dense and nocturnal object, which tries to embrace all the dimensions that compose her and that escape our capacity for representation. For this, the artist displays a practice similar to a dowser’s practice, activating an imagination that runs through tunnels, passageways, galleries and cavernous systems buried in the bowels of both the earth and the body. The daily use of the Madrid metro, as a transit place “that allows us an exogenous relationship with the earth’s mantle”; the analysis of its own vocal cords; or the speculation about the underground life of worms in the title, are all important references for Solar in this project.

 

A group of wall drawings welcomes the exhibition: Formas de Fuga (Forms of Escape) (2021), in which tongues, glottis, pharynx, genitals, jaws or other soft organs languidly open before our gaze in a salmon tonality. It is followed by Eco Chamber (2021) is composed of two diptychs made with a black marker, which show a clean cut of the fold, an indefinite flesh from a lens that allows us to appreciate its different layers and sections. In the next room rests the group of pieces Hermafrodita (Hermaphrodite) (2021): cavities of some body —geological or animal— that the claw of a bulldozer, or perhaps creature, has violently torn apart, like their tattered edges show. Its shapes are reminiscent of immemorial marine animals, or the shells of nameless specimens, while the saturated and strident colors that cover its interior walls are a reference to the colors that the operators of the subway and other underground infrastructures normally wear. Dazzling colors, whose brightness does not respond so much to the light that they are capable of reflecting, but to the conservation through the act of shining of that darkness in which they move; definitely, “the color of darkness itself” according to the artist. Finally, the series Nacimiento (Birth) (2021) shows a system of orange communicating vessels, in which various cellular patterns intersect and evolve symbiotically until culminating in the eruption of a tooth.

 

Solar reminds me of a quote from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut in which an alien from the planet Tralfamadore describes the poverty of time tunnel vision in Earthlings, only to conclude: “All time is time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take moments for what they are, moments, and soon you will realize that we are all insects trapped in amber. ” The movements through tunnels in this exhibition are also a metaphor for a linear experience of time that, far from any promise of peaceful progress, is a vector of anxiety in the artist in front of the prospect of an irremediably univocal future. The use of ceramic, being a material with a great insulating capacity, underlines this closure, evoking qualities of the watertight, even the hermetic. But pulling the thread of that unearthed imagination, these isolated and insulating clay sculptures also enclose within themselves a deep subsoil time in the very matter from which they are made and the speculation from which they emerge. By tearing and opening these cavities-pieces, the artist seeks to spread in front of us this stagnant time that flees from linearity towards other material ontologies, towards other ostensible imperceptibilities, and perhaps, also, towards another more egalitarian and less violent temporal distribution. In them beats a congregation of temporary powers, without definition or direction because as their name Hermafroditas (Hermaphrodites) (2021) suggests, they are creatures in a state of undifferentiation, of pure (sexual) potency without actualizing or fixing on any denominator; and that, therefore, they contain within themselves all future forms and possibilities.

 

At the heart of this set of sculptures and drawings there is Tuneladora (2021): a sculpture in which a pair of resin fins grow powerful and slender from a muddy outgrowth. The fins (which could also be blades, or oars) are painted from their edge in a gradient from navy blue to white, reminiscent of baroque chromaticism in the way that it underlines the shadows and lights of the piece while emphasizing its speed and movement. They refer to the dolphin and its symbolism that Solar reads in the key of Minoan mythology, where these animals are attributed the ability to guide to a safe harbor; and at the same time, they are covered with the patina of a fair booth that we find in previous projects of the artist. Their polished and dynamic finish contrasts with the heavy and immobile presence of the mud from which they arise; a kind of stump of a missing joint, perhaps belonging to some deep-seated dweller. In fact, the piece invites us to imagine that when it is operated, it has unearthed the cavernous sculptures that surround it: while the group of Hermafroditas shows the emptying, Tuneladora (TBM) presents the positive body that excavates the tunnel gallery. This amalgamation of the geological and shapeless materiality of the mud with the plastic hyper-definition of the fin combines in an unprecedented way two registers present in the artist’s work, the one of the raw and abstract power of the material with the updating vector of fiction, which crystallizes in a language — both symbolic and aesthetic— sharp and precise. As if the speculative grammar of fiction, loaded with all its signs and forms, emerged from the torrent generated by these two helices in the wild and unknown substrate

 

 

Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga

Curator, researcher and educator. She lives and works in Utrecht, where she is curator of the Post-Academic Program at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst

 

 

Teresa Solar (Madrid, 1985) studied Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense of Madrid.

 

Some of her most prominent solo shows include “Ride, ride,ride” in Matadero Madrid (2018) and Index Foundation in Stockholm (2019) and “Flotation Line” at DER TANK, Institut Kunst Basel, Switzerland (2018). She has also created solo exhibits in galleries such as “Time of worms” at Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona (2021), “Forms of Fleeing” Travesía Cuatro Gallery, Madrid (2020), “Pumping Station” in Travesía Cuatro CDMX Gallery in Mexico City (2019) and “Ground Control” at Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona (2017).

 

Solar’s work has been recently shown at the Liverpool Biennial 2021 curated by Manuela Moscoso, at the VII international Biennial of Young Art of Moscow (2020) and at the Köln Skulptur Park  #9 curated by Chus Martinez  (2017-2020) . Solar’s projects have been present at groups shows in Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunstverein Munich, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Maxxi Roma, CA2M Madrid, Patio Herreriano Museum Valladolid and Marcelino Botín Foundation Santander, among others. She is currently a finalist of the Future Generation Prize 2021-2022 at Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev.

Teresa Solar, Ride ride ride

26.10.2019 – 26.01.2020

Index (Stockholm)

 

Teresa Solar works with objects and the space in between them, with narratives and broken information. Solar experiments with textures and physicality understanding art as a situation to discover, feel and think. Her exhibited objects can be sculpture and also set material, can be produced or found but is in the conjunction that the whole group becomes a para-linguistic structure with internal dialogues in several timelines.

 

In her exhibition, Teresa Solar is mixing classic Egyptian mythology, details of contemporary history and linguistic theory: A sculpture of Nut – the goddess of the night in pharaonic Egypt – becomes the axis of the space at Index Foundation and a partner in a dialogue with plenty of references. Curro, the mascot of the universal exhibition in Sevilla 1992, with its bright colors and cartoonish design, is divided in fragments of memory and disappearance. A killer whale becoming a children’s game and a stretched tiger show the porosity and elasticity of objects, nodding the capacity of art to define other ways of relating to them and modifying its signification. A canoe with a new layer of paint is now an eye, a body, an openness. And still a canoe. Gestures become objects and games, objects become unwritten words and sensual connections, lapses of time offering the next experience to be discovered.

 

André Malraux had with his imaginary museum a collection of images to construct meaning: many possible museum narratives where waiting to be built from the selected photographs collected at Malraux’s archive. What happens when instead of possible images what we have is real objects? Can objects become the museum and not just the idea of the museum? Is the museum a physical experience? Can objects disappear while becoming a museum experience? Can objects become a trigger for memory? To visit an exhibition is a confrontation with hidden languages and bits of information and, still, a visual and performative contact with colors and surfaces.

 

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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.

The Lisbon Totem #3, 2017

Opening: 26.9, 7 pm 

Exhibition October – November

 

 

We are pleased to announce Pedro Cabrita Reis´ first exhibition in our gallery, presenting a selection of recent works of sculpture, paintings and photography.

 

The work by Cabrita Reis includes a great variety of media, varying from photography and drawing to large-scale paintings and sculptures, composed of industrial and often found materials, as in the case of Floresta, 2017, which we are presenting in the exhibition, and they frequently reach architectural dimensions. In this exhibition, we encounter works made of different materials such as steel, wood, aluminium, glass, enamel, bronze and acrylic. In the words of the artist, “Everything that exists is material which can be used in the construction of a work of art”. Consequently, he does not establish hierarchies between the objects and materials he work with. For Cabrita Reis, the material is the way of looking and thinking that changes everything.

 

Cabrita Reis´ work investigates the limits between architecture, sculpture, painting and photography, while he primarily considers himself a painter. His work is three-dimentional, often very personal and aim to alter, define or question the limits of spatiality. The meaning remains mysterious and fascinating. The contemplation takes form in the material, reaching the spectator, provoking new questions and linking imagination to experience.

 

Pedro Cabrita Reis began his career in the 1980s, as one of the most distinguished artists of his generation, introducing an universe of archaic and mythical references, collective memory and individual revelation. His works have had a great impact on the Portuguese and international culture, incorporating, into the more radical modern heritage, the possibility of returning to more traditional artistic disciplines: drawing, painting and sculpture.

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.

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.

 

 

We present Fabian Marcaccio’s work in a exhibition titled Family-Group-Cluster-Swarm at Galeria Joan Prats, showing his most recent work, 3 Dimensional paintings that behave like sculpture and installation.

 

As the starting point of the exhibition, Marcaccio researched specifically the meaning of family, group, cluster and swarm in society as well as in painting itself. The viewer is introduced in the first room by a swarm-like pictorial installation. Entering the main room, where a family, group, cluster of 3D works and rope paintings seem to tell a story.

 

Fabian Marcaccio has been one of the pioneers of digital painting in an attempt to redefine the pictorial genre, extend its temporal and spatial parameters, and track 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 in content change, sometimes rendered as panels, sometimes as 3D configurations, sometimes as animations, and sometimes on an environmental scale.

 

Fabian Marcaccio was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1963, and lives and works in New York since 1986. He has taken part in exhibitions at international art centers and museums. His recent exhibitions include Paintant Stories at Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro (2014), Variants at Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2013), Some USA Stories at Museen Haus Lange / Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (2012), The Structural Canvas Paintants at Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2012) and at Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011). In 2011 he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nidal

We are pleased to present Nidal, the first exhibition of Victoria Civera at Galeria Joan Prats, which includes a series of objects and drawings made by the artist in recent years.

 

Nidal* symbolically describes Victoria Civera’s way of thinking in her work process, providing an order of rhythm and movement in her pieces, which grow slowly and haphazardly, weaving an infinite membrane made of materials, objects, surfaces, color and differentiating skins, as if they were isolated words.

 

Its development is a reflection without pause, between silences and whispers, where Civera seems to invite us to a journey, to a concentric experience based on a logic of poetical thought, where the artist goes to meet with the phrase, event, subject and work. Mixing vocabularies and hybridizing playfull syntax, exposing cracks where figuration and abstraction overflow their conventional boundaries, her work grows joining friction and senses, facing her childhood and recreating it with reflection, drama and humor.

 

The words of the poet Paul Valéry could approach us to the echo of Victoria Civera’s work: “Poet, it is not one image that I seek, but the marvelous group of all possible”.

 

 

* Creation, desire, illusion; principle, foundation, reason why it happens or pursue something: belief.

Refuge, interior, home, thinking, introspection, double mirror.

 

 

Victoria Civera (Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955) lives and works between New York and Saro, Cantabria. Among her solo exhibitions, there are Sueños inclinados, IVAM, Valencia (2011), Atando el cielo, CAC, Malaga (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 centers such as CGAC Santiago de Compostela, MAS Santander, Caixaforum Barcelona, Mumok- Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Viena, MACBA Barcelona. Her work is at institutions and museums’ collections such as MNCARS, IVAM, CAC Málaga, Es Baluard de Palma, Artium Vitoria-Gasteiz, Colección Banco de España, Col·lecció “la Caixa” or Patio Herreriano Valladolid.