In postmodernist art, nature is treated as wholly domesticated by culture; the 'natural' can be approached only through its cultural representation. While this does indeed suggest a shift from nature to culture, what it in fact demonstrates is the impossibility of accepting their opposition
El Barro de la Revolución comprises some of the works created by Paloma Polo (Madrid, 1983) after her long stay, or rather her “personal and political immersion” in the Philippines since 2013. It is precisely the last of those works—a film lasting approximately 2 hours 35 minutes—what gives title to the show and functions as its connecting line, while at the same time giving rise to many of the social and political reflections present in other works by Polo during the time she spent in the Philippines.
Exploring Ana Laura Aláez’s work is to venture into an artificial paradise of appearance. A world where canons are turned on their heads, identities are polyhedral and ambiguity is a positive value. Ana Laura Aláez’s work has always wandered between truths and fictions, the body and its representations, objects and how we behave towards them.
Putting together an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela is like undertaking a trepanation. It’s making a hole in the artist’s head and inserting our fingers. Opening up his work to take the pressure off. Cutting a doorway into an artist’s system and sending him off down new roads to adventure.
Little animals, ash trays showcases a number of works that came from this facsimile alongside other prior works which are key to Rometti Costales’ artistic worldview. The project imagines a material and unpredictable choreography that allows materials, gestures, space or time to give shape to the unknown.
Julia Spínola (Madrid, 1979) develops her practice across the fields of sculpture and drawing. In her works, the continuous references to text and to performance give rise to systems of correspondences that operate as approximations to a single theme based on the relations set in place between figures, objects and movements.
Itziar Okariz’s practice is predicated on the confluence of actions and devices that expand the territory of performance and alter signs by means of a series of repetitions and differences that range from the body to the voice, as well as interferences in the public space and variations in language.
In June 1975, 42 years ago, Allan Kaprow staged the Com-fort Zones Activity (word used by Kaprow for his performing actons) at Galería Vandrés in Madrid. The Activity consisted in eight rules or protocols for couples, at a time when demonstrations of intimacy were checked by the authoritarian regime then in place.
Since museums first came into existence back in the eighteenth century, there has been a tradition of exhibiting that consists in showing sculptures in central courtyards and lobbies, allowing various fragments from the history of art to coexist in the same space, as part of a stage setting designed to be viewed by a comparative gaze.
This book, which accompanies the exhibition, is centred on three bodies of work. The first is a compilation of photographs that the artist Álvaro Perdices took while the Army Museum’s headquarters in the Salón de Reinos building in Madrid was being dismantled, and which forms a kind of archive around which the exhibition revolves. The second section unfolds and expands with the written word. For the third, the photographer Manolo Laguillo captured images of the installation inside the room. It includes texts by Juan Herreros, María Virginia Jaua, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Álvaro Perdices and Manuel Segade.