Exhibitions
( T H I S ) P R E C I O U S S T O N E S E T I N T H E S I L V E R S E A
Irene de Andrés, Erola Arcalís, Inés Cámara Leret, Yorgos Petrou, Stéphanie Saadé, Oscar Santillán + Yoko Ono. Curated by Aina Pomar.
A giant peanut with a blue face and red lips resides as a deity over a vibrant world of cartoon-like creatures. This is Maní, the fictional civilization created by Spanish artist Ana Barriga in which society centres around the peanut. For her solo show at Kristin Hjellegjerde’s gallery in London Bridge, the artist presents a new series of imaginative paintings that visualize everyday life in the peanut community. Through these surreal scenarios, Barriga pokes fun at real-life conventions, offering the viewer the opportunity to both laugh at and question the foundations on which civilizations are built. The exhibition runs until the next 8th of February 2020.
WE COLLECT presents ‘Empty Sea and Cavern’, the first solo show bu Alan Sastre in London, whith a selection of his two latest series of works. On one hand a series of monochrome canvases that offer the shade of one of the possible ways of pictorial surface refinement, and on the other hand a series of abrased looking paintings where he makes and unmakes during their process.
The ecology of extractive practices is a poisonous one. In Chile as in Sámi areas in northern Sweden, mining activities by multinational corporations are both visibly and invisibly shaping the landscape, intoxicating water, soil and air while displacing agricultural and indigenous communities. The excavation, extraction and exploitation of minerals – justified by the promise of immediate accelerated economic growth – means that spaces inhabited by communities become ravaged by desertification, contamination and expropriation, and sites of political and environmental dispute.
Guest curator and Maria Fusco takes master works from ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art as inspiration for ‘NINE QWERTY BELLS. Fiction for ‘Live Voice’, a short story in which each work of art gives a presentation at a conference. This is the second of four displays from the collection, which was established in 1985 to foster dialogue between Spanish and international art.
Isaac Julien’s nine-screen installation, premiering at Victoria Miro, traverses a collection of Lina Bo Bardi’s most iconic buildings, offering a meditation on the iconic work and on the legacy of the visionary modernist architect and designer (1914–1992).
When objects are removed from their original context, they can be arranged, collected, misunderstood and exotisized. Blue Curry and Fernando Martín Godoy, two artists from abroad living in London, bring their divergent practices together to consider the role that context plays.
Curry‘s work is playful and direct in its use of materials and in the symbolic possibilities of the found objects he works with. Martín Godoy’s paintings and drawings are more guarded in their approach to the object, obscuring it almost entirely and demanding the viewer’s time and observation skills before its presence materialises. In the conjunction of their works a conversation takes place, where elegance and humor lead to a number of reflections about the real and the fictive, the superficial and the transcendental.
This summer, the National Gallery, as part of its Spanish season, will show a select number of works by Bartolomé Bermejo (about 1440–about 1501), one of Spain’s most innovative and accomplished painters active in the second half of the 15th century.
Immortality it’s possible. At least for the Turritopsis dohrnii, popularly known as the immortal jellyfish. Silently invading our waters, this creature will reproduce and then, faced with the normal career path of dying, it will opt instead to revert to a sexually immature stage. And not just once: it will do it over and over again, eternally flowing into the sea. With no organs or brain to focus on, the only way to research on this creature is by observing its movements that constantly repeat.