Ruiz’s work uses comic as a starting point to investigate the possibilities of drawing as a mean for communication and expression of popular culture, unofficial policies and the dissemination of ideas through alternative channels. Although at the beginning his work focused its attention on the language and visual codes of the comic strip, its identification with the popular subcultures or the study of its own imagery, over time it has evolved towards a study of non-official ways of transmitting information. Interested in discovering the mechanisms of cultural distribution, his work has been physically developed to fully occupy the exhibition space in which the visitor is completely immersed. They are fictions that appear to be real, even in the smallest details, until the viewer discovers a content that stylizes, summarizes and enhances the society in which we live in a critical and analytical way

“HOUSE OF FUN” brings together these two aspects of Ruiz’s work: on the one hand it is presented as a false underground comic shop (one of those unofficial distribution mechanisms) and on the other its content reflects non-normative or non-majority sexual practices. In addition, from the entrance, the project is defined as a safe space against homophobia, sexism or racism. In fact, the fiction that represents the false store becomes an active space that encourages meetings to explore and share new ideas and test the limits of representation. The re-creation of fetishism and sexual imagery outside the norm also allows you to imagine new bodies and new societies. Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona, 1971) has exhibited his work at MNCARS (Madrid), IVAM (Valencia), MACBA (Barcelona), Gasworks (London), FRAC PACA (Marseille), Weserburg Museum (Bremen) and biennials such as Venice’s 201, Götteborg of 2017 or the Momentum biennial, Moss, Norway in 2019. He is one of the founders of the Institute of Porn Studies that critically analyzes the representation of sexuality and also functions as a laboratory for experimentation and study. Also, under the title of “Disturbing Distribution”, he has created a series of works that visualize the systems of circulation of goods and bodies in an attempt to point out the new disruptive spaces of capitalism.

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The exhibition articulates again around two supports: two Structures to speak while sitting down, now standing up, derived from some room benches that were never used and that derive in turn from the replicas made by the artist of the Struttura per parlare in piedi by Pistoletto, exhibited in the first exhibition of 2015. From them you can access a series of vignettes recorded on medium density boards that depict tell scenes of the past, present and future of the exhibition, implying that all works are the sum of its parallel universes, as in the Marvel comicbooks. Thus appears a bust from 2005 camouflaged as a current work, with feathers that the artist used in 2016. Or poor copies in plaster of a bronze finger, agglutinated as a column of eight limbs. Also a model of the Future monument of wisdom on top of the ruin of the Old monument of wisdom. And a display for agates made of agate itself. All this in order to cause a simultaneous, circular time, in clear tribute to the fourth chapter of Watchmen, “The Watchmaker”.

As in the collages of the Teleplastia series (2012-13), the exhibition once again becomes subject to itself and in that crease it creates a hole, a stain, a blind spot or a night material. When bending over itself a relief is produced, the subject appears: what escapes of the plane of the image just to return to it. The retrospective is now also its poor image, a labyrinth of gesture upon gesture that copies art history and abandons the myth of temporality. Originality here is made of “samples” and art’s legitimacy emanates from the farce of repetition. Same as this press release.

When we scratch we get rid of the itch by adding up sensations: we saturate the image with its own discomfort. Scratching activates the part of the cortex associated with short-term memory and yet there is still no answer as to why saturating sensation helps to forget the discomfort. The itching is, however, the conscious and exaggerated manifestation of the body imagining one of its parts and this is the relationship that Fernández-Pello maintains with his practice. Art as a trap that catches itself in its desire at a time that demands to do everything meaningfully.

Carlos Fernández-Pello (Madrid 1985) is an artist, curator and teacher, combining teaching with audiovisual production, writing or DIY. As a researcher he has worked for the Facultad de Bellas Artes  of the UCM, has been visiting scholar of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been a resident in Hangar Lisboa. He is the author of the book Partial Taste (Universidad Complutense 2017).

The post Carlos Fernández-Pello | Retrospectiva appeared first on García Galería.

The exhibition proposes a fantastic night voyage, from the first sculpture Moonrise to the last video Sunrise, a night where normal interactions between bodies and entities are suspended, and where the borders between human and animal, natural and artificial, cultural and vegetable blur.

Romão’s work has developed over the past ten years on a diversity of media, from poetry and sculpture to installations and video works. Exploring often-problematic interactions in cultural and environmental macrostructures, by means of an extensive collection of small actions, objects, and appropriations. Strongly anchored in poetry, Romão’s work uses or appropriates materials in a speculative manner, deeply rooted in the legacies of both Surrealism and the Baroque—in what can be understood as a continuous sabotage of codes and expectations.

The first Room of the gallery presents a series of new sculptures that continue Romão’s exploration of the contamination of both artificial and natural forms, the hybridization of bodies, and the life-like presence of inanimate materials. This works embody ideas of mutation, adaptation, and resistance, as well as a predatory, viral quality analogue to economical processes—such results in a borderless fluidity between Man and Nature, animal, mineral, and vegetable, abstract entities and real inhabitants of the land. Presided by a schematic representation of a moonrise, Pierna aperts to mutate from wood into animal and Cabeza (el hambre del monstruo) seems to inhabit a limbo between the sculptural, the human and the mineral, as for Pie, in an evocation of Dafne a foot transforms itself into a flower.

In the second room of the gallery Sunrise, filmed outdoors during the night and the break of day, responds to the moonrise in the first room. The video will document the surreal interaction of a group of ferrets with a sculptural fragment of a human body.

André Romão was born in 1984 in Lisbon, where he lives and works. A selection of his solo exhibitions include: Museu Berardo; Lisbon (2019), GaleriaVera Cortês, Lisbon (2017, 2015) garcía | galería, Madrid (2017); Syntax, Lisbon (2016); The Green Parrot, Barcelona (2015); Macro—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2014); Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2012); Galleria Umberto di Marino, Naples (2011); and Kunsthalle Lissabon (2010).

His work has been presented in group exhibitions in Meetfactory, Prague (2019), Tenderpixel, London (2018); MAAT, Lisbon (2017); CentroCentro, Madrid (2016); FUTURA, Prague (2016), CAPC—musée d’art contemporain, Bordeux (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Olso (2014); Serralves Museum, Oporto (2013 and 2010); Fundação Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2010) and City Museum, Lisbon (2009).

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Solo shows

2019    

Túnel – garcía | galeria, Madrid.

2015   

Lightvision Studies - Tabacalera Estudio, Madrid.

2014   

Vue générale du Mont-Blanc – Galería Fúcares, Almagro.

2013   

Regiones Metamórficas – Galería Fúcares, Madrid.

Group shows

2019    

Drum buzzer - At7, Amsterdam.

2018     

Querer parecer noche (Curated by Beatriz Alonso y Carlos Fernández-Pello) –  Ca2m (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo), Mostoles, Madrid.

XXVIII CIRCUITOS - Laboral, Gijon.

 Amor infinito - Salón, Madrid.

Tripping Autonomy (Curated by MAMA) – de Kroon, Rotterdam.

2017   

XXVIII CIRCUITOS - Sala Arte Joven, Madrid.

A modo de conclusión (Curated by Joaquín J. Sanchez) – Espacio Valverde, Madrid.

Promotora (Curated by Carlos Fdez. Pello) – Can Felipa, Barcelona.

T H IS I S A LL U R E - Wolfart, Rotterdam.

FUMBLE 9000 - The Freeshop, Rotterdam.

Erotisch (Curated by Clementing Edwards) – her house, Rotterdam.

2016 

En ausencia del socorrista (Curated by Rafa Munarriz) – Gresite, Madrid.

Projective Ornament (Curated by Karlos Gil) – garcía | galería, Madrid.

Narraciones Extraordinarias - Centro Galileo Galilei, Madrid.

Modelos Posibles (Curated by Bernardo Sopelana) – OTR, Madrid.

2014   

XXV CIRCUITOS - Sala de Arte Joven, Madrid.

#RESET INJUVE -  Sala Amadis, Madrid.

2013   

Homenaje a Walter Hopps (Curated by Tania Pardo) – La New Gallery, Madrid.

Grants and awards

2017   

Circuitos Artes Plásticas XXVIII, Madrid.

2014   

Circuitos Artes Plásticas XXV, Madrid.

2013   

Production grant INJUVE for “Vue générale du Mont-Blanc”.

2012   

II Encontro Artistas Novos, Cidade da Cultura, Galicia.

Residency program at RAMPA, Madrid.

Residency MOVIC, Pamplona.

Education

2018

MA Fine Art, Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

2014  

BA Fine Art, Universidad Complutense Madrid.

The post Víctor Santamarina appeared first on García Galería.

Included in this exhibition are four works, Túnel, Debris, Weight Transfer, and Restless Red. Starting from the most intimate experiences of the body in the artist’s lived context, each of the works began around a body—one body—from which their shapes derive. In the studio, akin to the casting process itself, these references undergo a process of mixing and transferal, as conceptual and material streams bleed into one another.

Temporally, the works come to be embedded with, and to document, the artist’s state-of-being and -mind; his haptic perceptions, daydreams, and the sentiments of songs played on repeat. Physically, as the various fragments—an arm, leg, torso, and head—evolve through processes of layering, Santamarina increases the margin for play and possibility in the materials’ response. As such, while a disassociation with the body occurs in terms of scale, the bodily reoccurs in the puckering, the cracks, and the silken textures that interplay across the works’ concrete surface; markings in which one can recognise the shadow of muscle and echoes of movement.

Taken together, and in the face of increasing  overstimulation in the present day, Túnel pursues an experience of suspension in which one’s grip is purposely unfastened. Comparable with, as the titles evoke, being stalled in a tunnel from somewhere to nowhere, or fragmented by pulsing lights in a nightclub. Existing as the momentary shift of a dancer from one step to the next, or as a piece of debris in endless orbit. It’s in the disorienting and transitory states such as these—coalescing contexts, bodies, and time—that the artist and materials begin their negotiation. Culminating in the material expressions here displayed; the results of friction between two or more moving parts.”

– Rosa de Graaf

Victor Santamarina’s work has been exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions,  recently including Querer parecer noche in CA2M, Madrid (2018); Amor Infinito in Salón, Madrid (2018); Tripping Autonomy, De Kroon, Rotterdam (2018); FUMBLE 9000 in The Freeshop, Rotterdam (2016);  Circuitos in Sala de Arte Joven, Madrid. Lives and work between Madrid and Rotterdam.

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Solo Shows

2019

Those things that your fingers can tell - Kunstverein München, Munich.

2018

Polifilia – garcía | galería, Madrid.

2017

First Act: Smooth Operations – Laure Genillard Gallery, London.

Picture yourself as a block of melting butter – Fundació Miró, Barcelona.

2016

Systems for displaying matter – Enclave, London.

The stuff that surrounds us – José de la Fuente, Santander.

2015

How are you feeling today? – Window Space (Whitechapel), London.

2014

Unforeseen Changes – The Green Parrot, Barcelona.

Eva Fàbregas and Andrew Lacon – Kunstraum, London.

2013

Homeless Abstraction – Plazaplaza, London.

2012

Una forma posible – Caja Madrid, Barcelona.

2011

Catalogació – La Capella, Barcelona.

Group Shows

2018

Polymeric Lust - Display, Berlin.

Mapamundistas – Ciudadela, Pamplona.

Every object is a thing but not every thing is an object – Hollybush Gardens, Londres.

Regreso al futuro – La Casa Encendida, Madrid.

Who cares? A radio tale – Gasworks/ResonanceFM, London.

Future section – Arco Fair, Madrid.

The futch – Sala de arte joven, Madrid.

2017

Scissors cut paper wrap stone – West Cork Arts Center, Cork.

Scissors cut paper wrap stone – Ormston House, Limerick.

Eyecatcher – Focal point gallery, Southend-on-sea.

2016

Teesside world exposition of art and technology – MIMA, Middlesbrough.

Soft control – Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh.

Projective ornament – García Galería, Madrid.

Scissors cut paper wrap stone – CCA Derry-Londonderry, London.

Generación 2016 – La Casa Encendida, Madrid.

2015

Hotfixes – Avalanche, Londres.

9th Biennal Leandre Cristòfol – La Panera, Lleida.

2014

Futurs Abandonats – Fabra i Coats, Barcelona.

2013

Modernitat Amagada – Casa Capell, Mataró.

Cas d’Estudi – Can Felipa Arts Visuals, Barcelona.

2012

INJUVE – Matadero, Madrid.

Itinerarios – Fundación Botín, Santander.

2011

Sense Títol – Facultat de Belles Arts, Barcelona.

2010

Encounters – Helsingin Kaupunginmuseo, Helsinki.

Human Spaces – LUME Gallery, Helsinki.

Miquel Casablancas – Sant Andreu, Barcelona.

2009

A títol propi – Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona.

Estratègia per a després del col·lapse – Can Felipa, Barcelona.

Residencies and awards

2015

Generación 2016 – Fundación Montemadrid, Madrid.

2012

INJUVE Visual Arts Prize, Madrid.

2011

BCN Producció’11 – Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

2010

Botín Foundation Visual Arts Grant – Fundación Botín, Santander.

Miquel Casablancas – Sant Andreu, Barcelona.

Education

2013

MA Fine Arts. Chelsea College of Art and Design, London.

2010

BA Fine Arts. Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona.

The post Eva Fábregas appeared first on García Galería.

The fact that a sculpture can combine a practical function together with a symbolic meaning or operate as a metaphor is the case of “Door” in which a sexual one-night encounter is summarized. The dualism between function and representation is the constant thread that runs through the show.

One of the lines of research on these limits is carried out through the materials with which he works, posing a series of contradictions. This is the case of “Duck of  duck” in which the sculpture is made, literally, of the represented object, which raises an irresolvable paradox. In other examples, the material adds a poetic or temporal charge that ends up tilting the sense of the object from the purely literal to a wealth of nuances closer to the metaphor.

On the other hand, when rethinking the forms, Bestués concerns are about metamorphosis and duality, two of the topics that have most recently interested him. An apple is not limited to being neither a recognizable form by all nor the matter that conforms it but both can be modified to give rise to a result endowed with new nuances.

Within the tour of the exhibition we must highlight a homogeneous group of sculptures that refer to the body through a schematization of the parts that make them up. They are metallic structures that support elements built on bone dust and that debate on the concave and the duct, on the surface and the mass as basic elements when it comes to representing the body.

David Bestué (Barcelona 1980) has exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofia MNCARS in Madrid, at the MACBA in Barcelona and has participated in group shows at the Ca2m in Madrid, Centre del Carme in Valencia, MUSAC in León.

The post David Bestué | Sombra y huella appeared first on García Galería.

The title of the exhibition refers to the term that biologists use to define those groups of organisms with common characteristics that do not share a recent common ancestor. That is, mammals and birds are warm-blooded vertebrates, but in both cases this character has developed independently during the evolution of each of them. But polifilia is also, in its etymological meaning, the love of several or many, what has recently been called polyamory.

This case of homonymy serves Fabregas to address the main issues of his most recent work. The exhibition presents a new series of  drawings on fake leather or, as it is called in spanish, “polipiel”, based on a morphological study of all kinds of tools, prostheses and ergonomic objects that we use directly on the human body. Some have a therapeutic function and an ergonomic design. Some exist to correct functions and others to correct our position or even to provide pleasure but they are always marked by their reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the body. These drawings have a taxonomic ambition: they are a classification of forms, of that in which the imprint of the natural becomes evident as much as its artificial origin.

The artist’s drive to gather and classify leads her to study the different forms of these objects as if it were a grammar, in which the variations between one and the other build a morphological language. And it is here when polifilia becomes clear: when we discover that regardless of its original function, the final result shares a series of common formal characters.

Finally, also the new sculpture we are presenting shares a formal correspondence with those objects although in this case the sensory and the tactile are manifested above all in an exaggerated, monstrous or even comic way. As the scale increases, we definitively move away from the detail of the human body to overcome it and fill the exhibition space until we relate to the viewer in a way completely opposite to that of the original object.

Eva Fàbregas (Barcelona, 1988) studied in Barcelona and London. For many years she has been part of Coro Vivaldi where she recorded a long discography. She has shown her work at Fundació Miró and La Capella in Barcelona, Kunstraum in London or La Casa Encendida in Madrid. Lives and works in London.

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“Twenty-five years have passed since his disappearance, yet the work of Pepe Espaliú (Córdoba, 1955) continues to reveal angles and places that, with an express desire that the artist dedicated a large part of his career to, had remained unseen, veiled, hidden.

Unlike the recent retrospective exhibitions that, since his death in 1993 due to complications related to AIDS, have been made within the Spanish State, this exhibition attempts an updated revision of his legacy. We wish to present the work of this fundamental artist, making visible the changes that came into being as the eighties gave way to the nineties in the last century.

Although Espaliú initiated his art career in Barcelona in the early seventies, during the rise of conceptual art in Catalonia, it wasn’t until the beginning of the eighties that his work became a complex territory of concealment and desire, where issues such as the body, identity, the double, illness, power, and death were progressively weaved together. Contact with members of the magazine Figura, and his joining a group of artists who were renewing the Andalusian art scene, were key. These artists took part in the budding postmodernity of a scene that emerged around the gallery La Máquina Española, in Seville. Espaliú was to become the “tightrope walker on the black line, one who knows how inhuman his task is and yet walks from one end to the other, from indifference to laughter, defying the void that makes us up as spectators”.

Pepe Espaliú. These Last Twenty-Five Years is a memory, and, just like the title of his first exhibition at La Máquina Española in 1987, it is also a betrayal, because it’s dedicated to the artists of the future, those he wrote a lullaby for in one of his texts. “Always stick to the margins, sons of God’s malaise”. This exhibition is a warning, a memory that, just like in Carrying, makes sense in the here and now. “A long and humid call… the last days”

Jesús Alcaide

Pepe Espaliú was born in Córdoba in 1955 to a family connected to jewellers and goldsmiths, and studied in the school of arts and crafts of his home town. He then continued his education at the School of Fine Arts in Seville, and finally moved to Barcelona in the early seventies. His contacts with the Catalan capital’s art scene, and the air of freedom within it, were to be of fundamental importance to his practice.

Towards the end of the decade, Espaliú moved to Paris, where he came into contact with the international art scene and came across the figure and oeuvre of Lacan and Barthes, who were to leave a deep mark on his work.

In the eighties, his relationship with La Máquina Española began, the Seville gallery around which an important nucleus of avant garde art was generated. Soon afterwards, he exhibited in Paris, Amsterdam, and New York. His work increasingly moved away from painting in order to explore sculpture, dealing with a personal and unique language in direct relation with the international renewal taking place at the time. But he also drew, wrote, or carried out actions. The connection between all these disciplines is evident in a series of personal symbolic images which were to become the fundamental axis of his mature work.

In 1990, he discovered he was HIV-positive, and the illness marked the last, feverish years of his life: a new series of sculptures, and above all the Carrying Project, which he focused on in the last year of his life, first with a performance in San Sebastian, and later on in Madrid, where it had an enormous repercussion in the media.

Pepe Espaliú died on the 3^rd of November of 1993 in Córdoba.

In May of 1994, the first retrospective of his work was shown at the Mudéjar Pavilion in Seville, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presented his first homage exhibition. Ten years later, the first comprehensive retrospective of his work was to be presented in Seville and in Madrid. In 2010, the Centro de Arte Pepe Espaliú opened in Córdoba, dedicated to the study of his work.

garcía | galería wishes to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pepe Espaliú’s passing with an exhibition to introduce his work to a new public, restoring his figure and his legacy, and highlighting his importance as one of the great innovators of sculpture in the last decades of the 20^th Century.

This exhibition made in collaboration with pepe cobo y cia, Colección Begara-Perea and the González Espaliú family.

The post “Pepe Espaliú. In These Twenty-Five Years” appeared first on García Galería.

Solo Shows

2018 

Salmón ladrillo coral  – garcía | galería, Madrid, España.

2017  

Anaranjado delgado  - Castellana 22 (WeCollect), Madrid, España.

2016    

Luenga y apenas celeste  - El Windor, Madrid, España.

Group Shows

2018 

Nunca pensé que necesitaría tanta gente  - garcía | galería, Madrid, España.

2016 

Pintura húmeda  e- Área 72- Galería Punto, Valencia, España.

2014  

Luminancia Sobrenatural Dominante  - Galería El mirador, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Residencies and awards

2017

Residencia en Zoina Seis – Galería Luis Adelantado, México.

Residencia: Intercambio de Residencias Artísticas entre Mundo Dios de Argentina y Nave Oporto de Madrid, España.

Residencia en Kankabal en Izamal (Yucatán) de la Galería Noox (México).

Premio Arte Lateral-Open Studio.

Premio: Ayudas a la Creación Artes Plásticas de VEGAP.

2015   

Premio: Premio a la Producción Artística de la Fundación Banco Santander.

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