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Press releases
Painting from A to Z at CAC Málaga
CAC Málaga, the centre for contemporary art run by Málaga City Council, presents the first solo exhibition at a Spanish museum or art centre by the German artist Anne Berning. Her theme is the world of painting and the stereotyped way in which it is classified in art books and catalogues, explored through the painted spines of large books in which the artists appear according to the pictorial style they represent. The exhibition, which will be open at CAC Málaga until August 19, comprises a site specific painting installation accompanied by a series of other paintings exploring the same theme.
Under the title “Encyclopaedic incompleteness”, CAC Málaga presents this show by Anne Berning, featuring a series of superb paintings exploring the way this well-known German artist sees art.
According to Fernando Francés, Director of the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, “In her painting, Anne Berning seeks to provoke a reaction to the phenomenon of the visual that confronts society today. Anne Berning presents her work as an open, changing reality in which parts can be added, moved or removed as the society surrounding the work advances.”
Taking as her point of reference the archives of art history, Anne Berning works with such different materials as photographs and films. In her view, today’s art requires a preliminary critical analysis of non-contemporary art. In Berning’s own words, her paintings are “a kind of collection of fragments, contrasts, lists and parallels.”
The connection between images, artists and those who view the work in a place without time or spatial limits is crucial in this artist’s opinion. Berning is interested in pictorial language, for she is convinced that painting communicates, transmits, enabling the artist to establish a continuous dialogue with her audience.
The exhibition “Encyclopaedic incompleteness”, organised with the support of the Espacio Mínimo Gallery in Madrid, comprises a series of paintings whose theme is the art world itself. The most outstanding is a site specific composition that Berning created especially for CAC Málaga. In it, wood panels and framed canvases are arranged in a long line like books on a library shelf. Though the books vary in size and thickness, there is no direct relation between this size and the artist concerned. The palette employed in these works, which imitate the spines of art books and catalogues, reveal Anne Berning’s careful employment of colour range. Another distinctive feature of the German artist’s work are her use of different typefaces, as well as such other resources as inverted commas. Her technique varies according to the desired effect, and she often creates details on the computer, scanning them, or even adding them herself.
The composition Kunstbücher (A, Z) is formed by thirteen separate works – the oldest dating to 2004, the most recent produced this same year – that complement each other to form a compact, impressive whole. Through her work, Anne Berning seeks to break out of the constraints that have been placed on painting in which the term “masterpiece” has been appropriated from literature and philosophy to highlight a particular artist or work though without any serious scientific criteria. This is why Berning orders her book spines from A to Z; to challenge our acceptance of this system of artistic evaluation.
Anne Berning ensures that the motif represented on the spine can be clearly and easily associated to the artist to whom it is devoted. Her extraordinary technical skill encourages the viewer to change from a passive admirer to an active audience capable of linking the work to the artist and reflecting on how reality is mediated.
Like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, amongst others, Anne Berning takes reproductions as her starting point, representing other artists and their works in their characteristic style. In short, this German artist makes her own, personal representations of specific works of art.
Though the result is a somewhat subjective view of art, Anne Berning’s selection of artists does not always respond to her personal taste, rather to the type of work and the extent to which it can be integrated with the others. Indeed, one might say that Berning’s installations are as interesting for the artists left out as for those actually included.
Career
Anne Berning (Werl, Germany, 1958) studied at the Hamburg College of Fine Art and the College of Applied Art.
Over the course of her career, the artist has received many grants and scholarships, including the DAAD in Vienna and the Hamburg working grant. In 2000, she took part in the Goldrausch artists programme in Berlin, whilst two years later she received the Nordhorn Art Award. For the last three years, this magnificent artist has been chair professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Mainz.
A rather prolific artist, Anne Berning has taken part in many exhibitions, both solo and collective, achieving considerable renown both in her native Germany and internationally. Her most recent solo show, apart from the exhibition presented at CAC Málaga, was Reread Another at the Städtische Gallery in Waldkraiburg in 2005. However, Anne Berning has shown her work at galleries and art centres all over Germany since 1994. These include: the Galerie aktueller Kunst im Osramhaus Schering Kunstverein, Kunstraum (Berlin); Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin; Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck; Kunstverein Neuhausen, Städtische Galerie Schwerin; Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Kiel; Galerie vierte Etage, Berlin; Wilhelmspalais, Stuttgart; and the Städtische Galerie Nordhorn.
Internationally, Berning’s work have been shown at such galleries as the Grunt Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, and Espacio Mínimo in Madrid. The collective exhibitions in which she has participated have spread her well-established fame to Berlin, Munich, Austria, Frankfurt, Cologne, Texas, Bremen and Rome, in addition to other cities. Anne Berning currently lives in Berlin and Wiesbaden (Germany).
Information:
CAC Málaga Communication and Press Department
prensa@cacmalaga.org
Tlf: 952 12 00 55
Fax: 952 21 01 77
Memory of the everyday takes over cac málaga
CAC Málaga, the centre for contemporary art run by Málaga City Council, presents the most important exhibition ever staged in Spain by Rachel Whiteread, a British artist whose themes revolve around her peculiar vision of everyday objects, which she reinvents using the technique of “emptying what we do not see.” The retrospective show comprises some 40 works, including outstanding pieces from each phase in Rachel Whiteread artistic career to date, mostly sculpture but also including series of photographs and silkscreens. The exhibition, open until August 26, is sponsored by Unión Fenosa.
The art of this special, singular sculptor is based on a series of confrontations (between the public and the private, between the copy and the original…) and on “emptying” spaces, using a painstaking “negative casting” technique to turn everyday objects into art. As a result, the CAC Málaga show features pieces inviting us to reflect on the objects that form part of everyday life, as Whiteread reinvents bathtubs, beds, tables, floors, chairs and doors by revealing the empty spaces they create. The exhibition also features a collection of 53 tiny dolls’ houses, an installation that calls to mind the traditional Christmas crib.
According to Fernando Francés, the exhibition curator and Director of CAC Málaga, Whiteread “has invented reality from its most simple essence, isolating it, removing it far from everything around it and from what is superficial to it, even, according to the canons of her own gaze, unnecessary. She has made faith lose sense or, better, has confirmed faith’s premonitions. Now we not only know that air occupies space; now we actually see it. Whiteread makes it art rather than science that reveals the mysteries of space, what occupies and what is occupied, to us. It would be clumsy to clarify her concepts of positive and negative, male and female, coupling and occupation, empty and full or even voids in general. It is absolutely empty. I prefer to think that she is more concerned with simple things, the elementary questions, relations with objects familiar to her and the spaces they recreate. That is the explanation behind the great connection that exists between her work and the anonymous spectator. Neither is this a mystery any longer, because the keys, the themes and the concerns coincide and complement each other with absolute simplicity. Here, there is mystery or, rather, mystique.”
Rachel Whiteread works by making casts from different materials such as plaster, resin, rubber or even dental cement. Her aim in this is to transmit the extraordinary that lies under the ordinary. In the exhibition catalogue, Mario Codognato reflects that each of these works emanates the slow, patient feeling of life lived, with ineffable naturalness, through the simple gesture of revealing the internal aspect of things. For Codognato, “the cast is an uncontrollable aspect of reality, a sign of what may exist but does not as yet. Experience teaches us that the final sculpture can be guessed at, that its presence, though not yet real, is hinted at. But the real mystery of sculpture, this process, has yet to occur. When the cast is filled, no one ever knows quite what the resulting image will be like exactly. We know that it will resemble the model, but it will never actually be it… Both have had living relations with the cast or – what amounts to the same thing – are aware of the reality that, in her work, provides the excuse to make the intangible present.”
Perhaps most outstanding amongst the 40 pieces featured in Rachel Whiteread’s exhibition at CAC Málaga is Village: 53 carefully arranged doll’s houses, each lighted within. The artist collected these houses from second hand shops and other places before transforming them. The work forms an amazing sight, with houses of different sizes arranged as if in a valley, on the slopes of a hill with winding streets. These dolls’ houses, some more than 70 years old, were made when it was not so easy to buy toys, though Whiteread bought some of them on the Internet. In this installation, the artist evokes the history of her family, rooted in different villages in the outskirts of London. Whiteread considers Village a work in progress, and will continue to play with it, enlarging and reinterpreting it, seeking new meanings.
The CAC Málaga show also includes Sixteen Spaces, casts of chairs made in coloured and translucent resin that explore the correlations between individuals. According to Codognato, “the chairs are object and symbol; they constitute a visible sign indicating the meaning of emptiness that the artist seeks to communicate”.
Another key element in Whiteread’s work is the floor, which represents women’s domestic work to keep it clean but is also, at the same time, sculpture and architecture. Her floors consist of smooth rubber and industrial resin, or wax applied to metal, themselves cast from plaster casts of real floors. In a similar line, the CAC Málaga show also features casts of several doors, ripped from everyday life which, according to Codognato, awaken memories of the experience of being shut into restrictive environments”.
The show also features another sculpture that is particularly impressive due not only to its size (300 x 500 x 643 cm), but also because, in a way, it summarises this artists concerns and interests. Room 101 is a cast taken from an entire room. It represents the air in the room, freezing it in all corners of the space, reflecting every imperfection of the flaking walls, every texture and all the elements that form its skin: frames, doors, lintels, etc. Reflecting on this, Fernando Francés writes that: “We all know that air occupies the interior of empty containers, jars, the empty spaces left in libraries by books, a bedroom… We are all aware that this is a fact, but we have never been able to appreciate its presence without the ‘cast’ that embraces it. The clearest example is bathwater. We have always seen and known it in relation to the recipient, the cast, but we have never been able to relate to this reality without its permanent, faithful companion. So we never become aware that the water can even exist, in this shape and size, without the bath that models it.”
Rachel Whiteread casts the empty interiors of objects. “Here sculptures become support for invisible forms that we intuit since many of the objectives are recognisable,” opines Codognato. The artist herself claims that her work is like “making a death mask for ancient Rome, a solid representation of death”. A sinister shadow falls over some of her works, as she destroys the object’s usefulness. As Whiteread puts it: “I look like the you I turned into, being your imprint. You are exactly what is lost since only you would fit into the mould which I have become”.
Biography
Rachel Whiteread (London, 1963) studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic/University of Brighton and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Arts. A leading figure in young British sculpture, she was awarded the Turner Prize in 1993 and the Venice Biennale Award for Best Young Artist in 1997. Her work has featured in more than 200 collective and solo exhibitions at such galleries as the Gagosian in London and New York, the Luhring Augustine in New York and the Koyanagi Gallery in Tokyo, and such prestigious museums as the Tate Modern in London, the Solomon Guggenheim in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum in Chicago, the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Kunsthalle in Basle, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Naples, the Kunsthaus in Vienna and, this year, now, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga.
Whiteread is linked to the YBAs, or Young British Artists, a generation that emerged in the mid-1990s though, in its serenity, her work is in stark contrast to that of other group members.
Further information:
CAC Málaga Communication Department
Tel.: (+34) 952 12 00 55
prensa@cacmalaga.org
A FIVE-METRE BABY IS BORN AT CAC MÁLAGA
Ron Mueck brings sculptural hyperrealism to Málaga’s Centre for Contemporary Art
CAC Málaga, the City Council-run showcase for contemporary art, presents Ron Mueck’s first solo exhibition in a Spanish museum or art centre. The show features a monumental sculpture of a baby, five metres tall, made from polyester resin. This is accompanied by maquettes, videos and colour tests illustrating the creative process behind the piece, as well as a documentary on the artist. Open until June 17, the exhibition is sponsored by local firms HCP & Arquitectos Asociados and Uni-on casas con corazón.
At CAC Málaga, Ron Mueck, an Australian artist living in London and linked to the so-called Young British Artists, or YBAs, presents his work A Girl, a baby of gigantic proportion showing such hyperrealist attention to detail as to create the illusion of a real anatomy in a piece that cannot fail to surprise and even hypnotise the visitor.
The sculpture, which stands five metres high, represents a new-born baby girl just minutes old. The piece is accompanied in Space 2 at the city’s former wholesale market by materials (maquettes, videos and tests) documenting the creative process behind its creation. Finally, the exhibition is completed by screenings in Space 5 of a documentary about Ron Mueck and his work, with Spanish subtitles.
A Girl typifies the Australian artist’s habit of using vastly exaggerated dimensions to portray the human, whilst also clearly embodying influences from classical sculpture, the most important, indeed, practically the only, reference in Mueck’s piece. Not in vain are pregnancy, birth and motherhood among the recurring themes in a sculptural work that approaches classical subjects from a modern, uninhibited standpoint.
With their poses and expressions, their realism, Ron Mueck’s human figures surpass reality itself, from which the artist extracts fragments only to decontextualise and freeze them in his work.
Hyperrealism
Mueck is a clear and representative example of contemporary sculpture, in which a salient feature is the masterful use of scale. His universe is framed within the hyperrealist tradition, by a naturalism that is taken to extremes. Ron Mueck does not merely imitate reality; he imbues his figures with the ability to express feelings, persuading the viewer that these are works with their own inner life and psychological depths.
In his text for the exhibition catalogue, CAC Málaga director Fernando Francés confesses that, of all the artists that have moved him, Ron Mueck is perhaps the only one to have done so by modifying reality towards exaggeration, whether by defect or through excess. According to Francés, Mueck’s works “generate a surprising provocation in the viewer’s gaze, and they do so not only by the dramatic quality and the coldness that his figures reflect and represent, but also by their modification of the established, the way they break the laws of balance, changing the natural status of people and things”.
For her part, art critic Susana Greeves notes in The Creation of A Girl, her piece for the catalogue, that Ron Mueck’s extraordinary and impeccable realism is achieved after a long, painstaking process. “Apart from his innate talent and his sensitivity as a sculptor, Mueck pits his technical skills and his ingenuity against the challenge of large-format sculpture and the preparation and casting of moulds”, she says.
To date, Mueck has created 35 works over the course of nine years, only one of them – a dog – life-size. All the other pieces are either larger or smaller than life, as the English poet and critic Craig Raine points out in the catalogue for the show at CAC Málaga. In his article, Raine also notes that Mueck’s art is characterised by the austerity of works in which “there are no failures”. However, he goes on, “perhaps there are: on the studio floor, in the rubbish bin. We are before something great, there can be no doubt”.
Career
Contemporary sculptor Ron Mueck (Melbourne, 1958) is a completely self-taught artist whose path to contemporary art began with the dolls he made in his free time when he was a child. Thanks to his work at his parents’ toy factory, Mueck was able to experiment with different materials, building up enormous knowledge about them.
In the late-1970s, Mueck then entered the world of television, where he worked for more than ten years, creating characters for children’s programmes like Sesame Street and The Muppets, as well as for the cinema (where he was responsible for the special effects seen in such films as Dreamchild and Labyrinth) and advertising (in 1990 he established his own business, making models).
Mueck’s career as a professional artist began in the mid-1990s. In 1996, he created a hyperrealist sculpture, Pinocchio, for his mother-in-law, the painter Paula Rego, who used it as a model for her series of Disney-inspired canvases for the exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film at the Hayward Gallery in London. The sculpture was shown alongside Rego’s paintings, and it was there that Charles Saatchi was struck by it, commissioning Mueck to produce a piece for his collection. And so it was that, one year later, Ron Mueck presented his sculpture Dead Dad at the controversial exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Mueck was also Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London from 2000 to 2002.
It was during this time that Mueck presented his monumental sculpture Boy at the 2001 Venice Biennial, after which he produced his most outstanding solo exhibitions. These include shows at the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden in Washington (2002), the National Gallery in London (2003), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia (2003), and the Fondation Cartier in Paris (2006).
In 2007 to date, Mueck has presented exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Ontario), the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York and, bringing us up to the present, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga.
BEECROFT’S WOMEN STRIP THE WORLD NAKED
The artist’s first solo exhibition in Spain
Vanessa Beecroft’s exhibition at CAC Málaga, entitled VB53, is her first solo show in Spain. It features a dozen photographs and a video based on a performance this Italian artist made with a group of 21 women in the Giardino dell'Orticultura in Florence, Italy, in June 2004. The show, which will run from 9 November 2005 to 15 January 2006 and occupies two exhibition areas at the CAC centre, is sponsored by Financiera y Minera.
For the first time in Spain, CAC Málaga hosts a show by Vanessa Beecroft, VB53, featuring a series of photographs of women who are completely silent, doing nothing, giving away nothing of their personal histories. These images, clearly of classical inspiration, evoking religious icons, transmit a powerful sensation of evanescence and timelessness.
These women wear just sandals, wigs and false eyelashes. They are portrayed in the photographs as just another artistic element, far removed from the reality that surrounds them. This distancing from context is further reinforced by the accessories the women wear, which are, to quote Vanessa Beecroft herself, designed “to make them look more like a drawing.” But the peculiarity of this nude work is that the models (not all of them professionals) pose as if they were dressed, challenging viewers to the point where they are the ones that feel observed and intimidated.
In each of these pieces, which call to mind the figure of Mary Magdalene, the colour of the naked female bodies is seen in juxtaposition to that of the earth, and its texture, further heightening the sense of ambiguity and provocation that the images transmit.
Focusing on the human body and operating in the space between art and life, the artist Vanessa Beecroft (Genoa, Italy, 1969), who lives and works in New York, subverts photography, painting, sculpture and videoart. Conceptually, although her works are recorded on photography and video supports, Beecroft is closer to painting than to other artistic media.
The art centres and museums where Vanessa Beecroft has shown her work include the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Wacoal Art Centre, Tokyo; the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Site Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven.
AMADOR EXPLORES NATURE TO MEDITATE ON HUMANITY AND THE WORLD
This Mallorcan artist will exhibit his video creation, Derives (Driftings), as of tomorrow at CAC Málaga.
The close relationship between nature and humanity comprises the primary motif in the video that Amador will present tomorrow, Friday, 21October at CAC Málaga's Space 5, an institution under the auspices of the Málaga City Council. This piece, Derives (2002), which will be on view here until 6 November by sponsorship of Financiera y Minera, delves into the processes of transformation, change and drift occurring in nature, as a reflection of the constant fluctuation of contemporary society.
The video artwork, Derives, which lasts nine minutes, may well be the artist's masterpiece, for it touches upon all of his research and thoughts. It uses his original anthropomorphic sculptures as sarcophagi which appear and disappear, floating in the sea.
One of the artist's most outstanding characteristics is his passion for experimentation and the use of industrial materials. He attempts to create a sensorial atmosphere, in his own words, “a space that incites reflection, that provokes the senses”.
Amador is currently one of the artists from the Balearic Islands with the most consolidated professional careers. His oeuvre has invoked great interest amongst critics over the past decade, attaining both national and international recognition on the contemporary art scene.
Amador Magraner (Pollença, Mallorca, 1957) has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at various galleries and art institutions, above all in Germany and Spain. Different establishments include some if his works among their collections, as, for instance, CAC Málaga, the Coca-Cola Foundation, the Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo (Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art) in Madrid, Volksbank Berlin and the Fundación Aena, among others.
EMOTIONS, FEELINGS AND IDEAS ILLUMINATE THE WORKS BY JAUME PLENSA AT CAC MÁLAGA
7th October 2005 – 8th January 2006
Curator: Pilar Pertusa
Sponsors: GM Comunicación and Grupo Suite
The Jaume Plensa exhibition at CAC Málaga, an institution under the auspices of the Málaga City Council, is comprised of eleven pieces, including sculptures and installations, which establish a direct dialogue with the viewer oriented towards eliciting emotions and triggering thought, where literary references and a play of opposites take on a central role. The exhibition, which will be on display until 8 January 2006, is sponsored by Grupo Suite and GM Comunicación.
Duality is one of the constants in Plensa’s creative process, in which he combines opposites (the material and the immaterial, presence and absence, reason and spirit) with the aim of eliciting emotions of the viewer, appealing to sensorial factors and to memory. His work is highly elaborate and personal, and the spectator has to interact with the pieces, touch them, enter them or walk around them.
Plensa’s work, occupying two exhibit spaces at CAC Málaga, focuses on the human dimension and its relation to its surroundings, often questioning the role of art in society and the position of the artist. By the same token, the close relationship between the human body and ‘the whole’ is defined with great clarity, as the artist himself explains in the text to the exhibition catalogue.
This Catalan sculptor transforms the physical space into an extension of mental concepts. Through his work, he carries out an exercise in memory. A series of ideas and concepts, often dense and involved, fill the artist’s intricate and personal work, whose result is volumetric and radiant.
The artist uses varied materials in his works, such as resin, polyester, steel, iron, water, glass or nylon, not because of the innate characteristics of these supports, but on the basis of a need to attain different modulations for his ideas and thus obtain a differentiated spatial form for each idea.
Language is also a fundamental element for Plensa, as he conceives of it as a “container of memory”. By the same token, literature constitutes one of the main sources of inspiration for his work, as reflected in The Song of Songs and The Three Graces. Silence and light are likewise intrinsic and fundamental aspects of his pieces, both elements comprising recurring motifs that unify the exhibition.
The Wispern installation is one of the most spectacular works in the exhibit, consisting of 44 cymbals with engraved phrases and words - excerpts from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell - upon which droplets of water are constantly dripping, producing a whispering sound whose aim is to transport the spectator to a world of silence. On this occasion, at the CAC Málaga exhibit, this installation will be shown in its largest format to date, more cymbals having been added to the piece since its initial creation in 1998.
Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955), one of the sculptors with greatest national and international projection of our times, currently lives and works in Paris and Barcelona. He studied at La Llotja School of Art and at the Escola Superior de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi (Fine Arts Institute of Sant Jordi), and he has recently been granted the degree of Doctor of Arts, Honoris Causa, by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions held in different places throughout the world, including the retrospective held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2000 and Silent Noise, held in Chicago under the auspices of SEACEX (Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, i.e. National Society for Cultural Action Abroad), he has carried out many public sculpture commissions, some of the most remarkable being The Crown Fountain in Chicago and the stage sets for operas and theatrical pieces by the theatre troupe, La Fura dels Baus.
DOROTHY CROSS DELVES INTO THE HIDDEN BEAUTY OF NATURE IN SEVERAL PROJECTIONS
In Space 5 at CAC Málaga, seven videos by this Irish artist are on view
Space 5, at CAC Málaga, an institution under the auspices of the Málaga City Council, exhibit a selection of the latest works by the Irish artist, Dorothy Cross, beginning on Friday, 23 September. This exhibition consists of seven videos that express the artist's passion for nature, which appears accompanied by such elements as music and light. The exhibition, sponsored by Financiera y Minera, can be viewed at the Art Centre until 16 October.
The latest work by Dorothy Cross, which are on view at Space 5 of CAC Málaga beginning on 23 September, consists of seven video creations that the artist carried out between 1999 and 2005. In these works, which will be projected on two different supports (the wall and monitors), nature is the central theme, with references to other aspects of modernity as religion, culture and personal identity. Antarctica (2005), Stabat Mater (2004), Jellyfish Lake (2002), Eyemaker (2000), Ghostship (1999), Trophy (2002) and Endarken (2000) are the videos by Cross that will be on view until the coming 16 October at the CAC Málaga exhibition hall dedicated to video art.
In her short films, of durations ranging from one to twenty-two minutes, Cross blends nature and religion with music and performance. Stabat Mater (2004) is a good example of this. Taking place in a former slate quarry from which the material for the roofing of the Paris Opera House was extracted, the video is based on a representation of the opera, Stabat Mater, by Pergolesi, performed by the Opera Theatre Company.
In Antarctica (2005), Dorothy Cross shows life on the glaciers of the South Pole. The silence and the images in black and white are intended to catch the viewer’s attention. Her work, Ghostship (1999), granted the Nissan Public Art Prize, is the most difficult installation that the artist has created to date. It consists of a boat moored in Dublin Bay that shines intermittently, appearing and disappearing in the darkness.
This Irish artist is known for her installations, sculptures, videos, photographs and performances, wherein she uses a wide variety of materials, including ‘found objects’ that had belonged to her family for years, constructed objects, photographs and animal hides. The central motifs in her work are gender and cultural identity, as well as her personal life history and memory.
Dorothy Cross (Cork, Ireland, 1956) has had a great many solo exhibitions since she attained considerable recognition in the eighties. Some of the most important were held at art institutions in Europe and the United States, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zagreb, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Artpace in San Antonio and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She has furthermore represented her country at such international events as the Biennials of Venice, Istanbul and Liverpool. At present, some of her works are part of the permanent exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.
LIAM GILLICK
McNamara Motel: Selección de obras de texto 1990-2005
16 septiembre - 6 noviembre
Comisaria: Helena Juncosa
Making use of black vinyl on a white wall, Liam Gillick presents his first individual exhibition at a Spanish art centre, CAC Málaga, a space dependent on Málaga Town Council. In McNamara Motel, the title of this exhibition, sponsored by the British Council, which will be open to the public until 6 November, Gillick is showing a selection of his text works done over the last fifteen years in a design created specially for the occasion. A publication in Spanish and English completes the installation in which Gillick reveals his more conceptual side, which is less known in Spain.
McNamara Motel is the first exhibition of Gillick’s work at an art centre in the country. The written word is the main component of this show, where the ideas and concepts are exhibited in black vinyl on a white wall, all using the same typeface (Helvetica bold). As the artist himself says, the book-catalogue is the key to understanding and giving meaning to the exhibition, since it contains images that show the original context of the works from which the phrases on show have been taken. One wall shows the texts in their original language (generally English) and the one opposite the same texts translated into Spanish.
Gillick plays with time – past, present and future – and intermingles stories and characters which had no connection in their original context. With a historical and social base, he establishes a link between his works and different spheres of society, such as space, time, architecture or music. As Peio Aguirre explains in the text for the exhibition catalogue, “the ambiguity and abstraction of his works are no more than a will to an incompletion which needs to be finished at some other time and place”.
Through the combination of text, design and installations, Gillick examines about the way in which economic and social reality affects people in order to explore alternative systems and raise new questions which allow for new answers far removed from any ideology, though dialectical materialism is an underlying starting point for the creation of his works.
First Publication in Spanish
The book-catalogue is a vital instrument within the exhibition which, as well as works from other exhibitions, contains extracts from earlier books translated into Spanish for the first time, together with new ones which Gillick has conceived specially for this communicative vehicle, published in a bilingual version (Spanish and English).
Since 1995 Liam Gillick has published a number of books that function in parallel to his artwork including Literally No Place (Book Works, London, 2002); Five or Six (Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 1999); Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre (Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Ludwigsburg, and Orchard Gallery, Derry, 1997) and Erasmus is Late (Book Works, London, 1995). Underground (Fragments of Future Histories), (Les Maîtres de Forme Contemporains, Brussels and Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2004) has just been published and Construcción de Uno a text addressing post-industrial developments within a revised ecological framework will be published in early 2006. In addition, Liam Gillick has contributed to many art magazines and journals including Parkett, Frieze, Art Monthly and a regular column for Metropolis M in Amsterdam.
McNamara Motel was the title of a work installed in 1997 on the side of the Old Debtors Prison in Dublin. In common with many of the works in this exhibition, it functioned in parallel to a condensed body of writing; in this case the multiple versions of a movie script titled McNamara that were written between 1992 and 1994. As with many works since that period, the work points both backwards to a text that was mainly private and concealed and forwards towards a sequence of further works that used the scripted matrix of reference points as their root.
While the exhibition appears to focus on one aspect of the work, it is no more or less representative of artist´s practice than any other exhibition. However the decision to address certain works that are text based in a public space such as the CAC Málaga, is a conscious one. This exhibition functions both as a physical absence/restatement and a documented presence/realignment in this book.
The Centre exhibition room also contains two circular benches, which Gillick designed for the 2003 Venice Biennale, so that visitors can sit, look at, and try to decipher his work as they examine the catalogue.
Another noteworthy aspect of this exhibition is that it shows Gillick’s more conceptual side, as opposed to the visual part of his work, which has appeared more frequently in his earlier exhibitions at art galleries in Spain.
The complexity of his works, far removed from any fast or easy interpretation, does not leave the public indifferent, but invites them to experiment with thought and analysis.
BJORN MELHUS, THE LATEST ARTIST TO BE FEATURED IN CAC MÁLAGA'S SPACE 5
No Sunshine is the title of the short film by this German artist, which will be screened at the centre from 6-20 September
No Sunshine will be screened from Tuesday 6 to Tuesday 20 September at Space 5, a new exhibition area at CAC Málaga, the art centre run by Málaga City Council. The short film, by Bjørn Melhus, takes us into the German artist’s peculiar futurist universe, revealing his passionate love for film, television and music.
Melhus’s five-and-half minute video is a musical work in which the artist explores the desire to connect between different people and generations. Full of humour and irony, the film takes as its theme loss of identity in a world of technological images in which human beings are created, seemingly perfect “clones” that are, however, incapable of dialogue or communication.
In line with his other films, Melhus takes the lead role in No Sunshine, as well as playing all supporting roles. Indeed, Melhus generally writes, records, directs and produces all his films, as well as taking care of sound and characterisation. This peculiarity helps to reinforce the vision of a clone-like nature present in today’s society which Melhus seeks to transmit.
Works by Bjørn Melhus (Kirchheim/Teck, Germany, 1966) have been shown at such art centres as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kunsthalle in Bremen and the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Spain, Fundación “la Caixa” and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea are amongst the centres that have recently staged showings of his works. Bjørn Melhus currently lives and works between Hanover and Berlin.
CAC Málaga acquired the DVD No Sunshine at the latest Arco International Art Fair.
Space 5
The objective of Space 5, the new exhibition area at CAC Málaga, which opened on July 1 this year, is to showcase selected artists and make them better known by focusing on one of their most essential works.
The firm Financiera y Minera is CAC Málaga’s partner in organising events in this new exhibition space.
Forthcoming artists whose works will be featured in Space 5 are Dorothy Cross (from September 23 to October 16) and Runa Islam (from October 18 to November 13).
CHEMA LUMBRERAS
CAC Málaga
1st july – 4th September 2005
Curator: Pilar Pertusa
The works of Chema Lumbreras (Málaga, 1957) convey the social reality of our most immediate environment and in them we can perceive the thoughts, doubts, dilemmas and problems of man today. Some of the pieces – most done between 2004 and 2005 – will be on show for the first time at CAC Málaga. The artist’s own dreamlike experience plays a fundamental role in his creations, since the subjects and stories expressed in his work often spring from a reproduction of his dreams.
Using wallpaper and wire – which give the pieces great fragility and lightness – as his main technical resources, Lumbreras has made more than a dozen small format sculptures and installations in which he draws attention to the connection between animals and the human race: the humanised animals or the human figures with animals’ features are a visual instrument the author turns to constantly. Capsules, sweets and medicine boxes complete the cast of recycled materials with which he constructs a discourse that verges on fantasy, the surreal. His hanging figures defy technique and tradition with visual games and suggestive metaphors.
Chema Lumbreras studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and has had many exhibitions, both individual and collective. He has taken part in contemporary art fairs through Alfredo Viñas’ gallery in Málaga and many of his works have been selected for visual arts awards and competitions.
CAC MÁLAGA OPENS A NEW SPACE DEVOTED TO VIDEO ART
Work by British Artist Jason Martin Launches New Exhibition Area
CAC Málaga, Málaga City Council’s Contemporary Art Centre, today opens Espacio 5, a new area devoted mainly to video art works, though other art forms will also be featured. The aim of the new space is to draw attention to an artist by showcasing one of their key works. From today, then, this new section opens with Aquarius (2004), an oil on aluminium work by Jason Martin.
A key element in Jason Martin’s art is his use of line, imitating the body’s movement to create pictorial abstractions. Though he works in monochrome, the light brings out different colours in his works, which are open to a multitude of interpretations.
Jason Martin (Jersey, 1970) began to become known on the international art scene thanks to the Sensation exhibition in 1997. His work has been extensively shown in galleries and museums all over Europe, the United States and Japan. Aquarius will be on show at CAC Málaga until July 30.
Works by some 10 artists, including Cristina Martín Lara, Dorothy Cross, Jonathan Hernández and Mireya Masó, will be shown at Espacio 5 over the course of the present year.
NEO RAUCH
Neo Rauch's first solo exhibition in Spain brings together twenty or so paintings, mostly in large format, which summarise his work over the last few years (2002-2005). Rauch's contribution to contemporary art is regarded as one of the most valuable today. His enigmatic works, whose roots are sunk in the pictorial language of postwar Eastern Europe, bear witness to the new thrust painting has been enjoying in recent years.
Educated at the legendary Leipzig Academy, in the school of socialist realism, Neo Rauch has become one of its most influential graduates. His painting blends elements of industrial symbolism, pictorial figuration, German romanticism, the communist aesthetic, surrealism, the comic and Leipzig mannerism.
The juxtaposition of all those elements combined with his particular use of colour produces a fundamentally eloquent work, in which the action or actions recounted seem to be suspended in time, all beneath a halo of hallucination which heightens the mystery which emanates from his paintings.
Impassive athletic figures engaged in manual tasks often appear, facing arid settings, industrial complexes, futuristic yet strangely old-fashioned devices which endow Rauch's narrative discourse with a sometimes disquieting ambiguity.
As Doctor Robert Hobbs says in the exhibition catalogue, Neo Rauch's painting emphasises the contradictions instead of resolving them, whilst it tries to assimilate the inconsistencies that arise from the reunification of capitalists and socialists. According to him, Rauch's work, especially since 1997, has tended to describe the situation of East Germany in a reunified country, to symbolise the difficulty of integrating any past into the present.
Rauch's love of classic comics can be seen, for instance, in the inclusion of bubbles and isolated scenes in the palette of colours he generally uses. Bright yet dull, they help to recreate the atmosphere of dream and mystery reflected in his canvases.
Neo Rauch is the leader of what is known in art circles as “the rise of German art”. Unlike other generations of artists, like the Young Brit Artists, who generally go for effects and sensations, the main characteristic of the Germans is a return to painting, technically brillant with a host of allusions to motifs drawn from traditions like romanticism, surrealism and mannerism.
TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ
Fire and smoke are the main themes of the exhibition Teresita Fernández is presenting at CAC Málaga, at Málaga Town Hall, from 3 June to 4 September. An installation in the shape of a ring of fire, two floor works, one wall piece which could recreate the process of the crystallisation of minerals, five series of paintings and works on paper make up this exhibition, her first solo show at a Spanish art centre, sponsored by Inmobiliaria Peñarroya.
The work of Teresita Fernández (Miami, Florida, 1968) finds its inspiration in nature, in its constant changes and the astounding shapes, textures and colours that emerge from the infinite combinations of the universal elements: water, earth, air and fire. In her work, nature is represented as an artistic spectacle, worth seeing and admiring.
This exhibition at CAC Málaga is dedicated to fire, undoubtedly the most enigmatic – because it is so untouchable, so violent – of the elements. The central work is the one entitled Fire (2005), an extraordinary installation in the shape of a ring of fire formed by a metal structure and threads of silk. The piece, which creates an optical illusion of transparency and density of colour, was made during her time at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. As the critic Manel Clot explains in the exhibition catalogue, she uses fire “as an image and a concept; it is her idea, her only link and guiding element”.
The installation is accompanied by a series of drawings on wood (smoke) which represent, among other motifs, the different ranges of colours taken by smoke, and another on paper (signals) which reflects the forms it adopts according to the atmospheric conditions in which it is produced.
The show is rounded off by Cadmio, a wall piece made of small cubes of glass which recall the crystallisation of minerals, as well as two floor works (Eruption) which represent volvanic eruptions, made of wood, small glass beads, aluminium and vinyl.
Reflection and Visual Vibration
Teresita Fernández's work comes from a process of reflection, a detailed study of forms and colours, of elements and materials. In her opinion, it is vital to involve the spectators by having them look at the piece and update their own experience, which must lead them to the reflection that was the origin of the work.
Her aim in her work is to build bridges between group memory and personal experience, between different worlds, “to complement the meanings and increase the possibilities and allusions existing in the works”, as Clot says.
The heartbeat and visual vibrations of her installations are her signs of identity and an indispensable element for the creation of images established through meditation, the subjective part of human experience. Her minimalist abstractions use the natural world of our imagination.
Teresita Fernández studied Art at Florida International University and Virginia University. Her work has been recognised with many international awards and prizes and has been shown at art centres as prestigious as the Whitney Museum and MOMA in New York – where she lives now –, MOCA in Miami, the Site Santa Fe and Castello de Rivoli in Turin.
THE NEW BARBARIANS
TIM NOBLE & SUE WEBSTER
April 8-May 29, 2005
CAC Málaga, Contemporary Art Centre of Malaga
Curated by Helena Juncosa, CAC Málaga Chief Curator
Sponsored by the British Council and Dunnes Stores
The New Barbarians is the title of the installation that the British artists, Tim Noble and Sue Webster (Stroud, 1966, and Leicester, 1967, respectively) will present tomorrow at the CAC Málaga in what will be their first individual exhibit in Spain. Partners in art and in life, their work is one of the most interesting on the international art scene. It focuses on exploring the consequences of consumerism.
The work that Tim Noble and Sue Webster will present at the central exhibit space of the CAC Málaga is based on a diorama of the Museum of Natural History of New York. It displays a reconstruction of two Australopithecus, ancestors of the human race, recreated on the basis of some recently discovered footprints that suggest a male and female walking together. This discovery constitutes new evidence that species previous to humans had lasting social relations over three and a half million years ago.
In The New Barbarians, Noble and Webster create a life-size version of these hominids using fibreglass and translucent resin, and lending them their own facial features, thus carrying out peculiar self-portraits in the line of previous works, once again reflecting these artists’ interests in human relations.
In the work, the two figures, nude and free of body hair, apparently having a conversation, seem to be the last inhabitants on Earth who are wandering through a post-apocalyptic land, in the middle of a hall (the central exhibit space at CAC Málaga) whose whiteness evokes the sensation of infinity. Their nearly human bodies and expressions approaching a contemplative state lend the work a strange and moving beauty.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster held their first joint exhibition in 1996 at the Independent Art Space in London. The title, British Rubbish, alluded to the artists’ determination to tackle head on the stereotypes and hyperbole generated by and about the so-called Sensation Generation or YBA (Young British Artists) and their main benefactor, the art collector, Charles Saatchi. Their work radiated the same tone of irreverence and transgression, but went a step further in the sense of criticism and delved into the phenomenon of the artist as a media celebrity.
Since then and until the present, they have been creating profound artistic works that analyse their environment and reinterprets it. In doing so, they use basic materials such as lights and rubbish, with which they have created curious luminous panels and overwhelming ‘shadow sculptures’ through an assemblage of recycled waste materials and light projected on them.
RECENT PAINTINGS. ALEX KATZ
March 11-June 12, 2005
CAC Málaga, Contemporary Art Centre of Málaga
Curated by Fernando Huici
Sponsored by Afinsa, Interlaken and Unión Fenosa
Collaborator: Embassy of the United States of America in Madrid.
Recent Paintings is the title of the exhibition that CAC Málaga dedicates to Alex Katz, whose contribution to painting is deemed be one of the most valuable of recent decades. The exhibition, open from March 11 to June 12, will bring together a total of 23 works, including landscapes, night paintings, seascapes, flowers and portraits. These works, most of them in large format, form a review of this great artist's work during the last decade.
The work of Alex Katz (New York, 1927) is internationally recognised as possessing its own, unclassifiable style. Nonetheless, Katz uses elements associated with abstract expressionism, such as the large size of his canvases; with pop art, in the iconic transformation of his images and his repetition of figures; with minimalism, seen in the neutral backgrounds against which his silhouettes frequently stand out; and with cinema and advertising ways of representation.
The result are monumental paintings in which light is used to modulate the surface on which the composition is built up using flat, bright colours in an attempt to capture what Katz calls "that immediate sensation you see before you focus". The situations he portrays are seemingly trivial scenes from everyday life, ephemeral moments elevated to a higher status when transferred to the canvas.
These paintings are the result of a complex process of execution. Like the old masters, Katz makes sketches before his models, noting the colour changes he will later make. He then works the sketch up in scale, perforating all the lines and placing it on a canvas he has previously prepared with several layers of plaster and white lead, over which he sprinkles burnt Siena pigment. Having obtained his outlines in this way, he proceeds to fill them in with fine brushstrokes of oil paint. He has always used oil because, as he himself says, "it suits what I do and also ages very well". This technique, reminiscent of al fresco painting, helps to produce the clean, flat surface that characterises his work.
Alex Katz numbers Matisse and Pollock amongst his greatest influences, the former for his extraordinary technique and the latter for the energy in his work. With regard to his own work, Katz says there are two characteristics he seeks to maintain: “technically, I like a kind of seamless painting, and philosophically, in a nutty way, a sort of positive feeling about being alive”.
International recognition
Alex Katz's work has been shown in nearly 200 solo exhibitions at the most prestigious museums and galleries all over the world since 1954. Similarly, he is also represented in the public collections of more than one hundred centres, including the MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery of Washington, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum Moderne Kunst of Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Tokyo, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía of Madrid and CAC Málaga itself.
Nonetheless, despite this international recognition, Alex Katz rejects the idea of the artist as genius. In his view, this pose is nothing more than a 19th-century myth "that Picasso swallowed, beginning to behave like one when he was too good a painter to do such things".
The works by Alex Katz presented at CAC Málaga form an excellent display of his work over the last decade. Night paintings, seascapes, landscapes, forests, flowers and his renowned portraits make up an exhibition that demonstrates that Katz's work has lost none of its characteristic freshness and elegance.
LA HISTORIA SE CONFIESA. NONO BANDERA
The Projects space in the CAC Malaga will be hosting since next 23 November an exhibition of the work of Nono Bandera which opens on 26 November. Entitled La Historia se Confiesa (History confesses), it features a total of three series including the one from which the exhibition takes it title and which has been specially created for the CAC Malaga. The characteristic humour, irony and absurdity found in this Málaga artist’s work are the main protagonists of an exhibition displaying his most recent pieces, which can be visited until 23 January 2005.
The duplicity of meanings and a comparison of the real and the apparent are the main subjects of La Historia se Confiesa, an exhibition in which Nono Bandera (Malaga, 1958) displays his talent for reinterpreting and rereading popular iconography. To this end, and as he has done before, Bandera recovers works found in flea markets by painters relegated to oblivion, to which he provides new meanings while at the same time discovering hidden expressions in the seemingly conventional.
This work of intervention and rereading reaches its maximum expression in the series that gives the exhibition its name. History Confesses gathers together a total of 50 small drawings representing major historical figures such as Solomon, Hernán Cortés, Saint Sebastian, Aesop, Juan Ponce de León and Themistocles… Figures around which a moralist and edifying discourse has traditionally been formed, but on which the artist intervenes to draw a confession from them, so that they end up saying what they do not want to say. In this way, he discovers with much irony interesting subtleties that in the majority of cases appear hidden in the pages of history books.
As Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego explains in the exhibition’s catalogue, “History, according to Nono Bandera, is nothing more than a deceptive surface, behind which bubbles a background of perverse and obscene possibilities, always held in the domain of the forbidden.” Repressed frequently sexual aspects rise to the surface after the artist has intervened. In this way, he concludes that nothing is what it seems and everything is susceptible to reinterpretation.
Decontextualization
This work of decontextualization is also apparent in the installation This & That (2003), a series of fold-outs upon which recovered works by other artists have been placed, creating trompe l’oeil that simulate rooms in a bourgeois home. The unusual, the sarcastic and the humorous can once again be found in this work, in which Nono Bandera has introduced sometimes absurd elements that distort the apparent fixed balance of the rooms.
The same trompe l’oeil technique is used by the artist in the series completing the exhibition. Ventanas (Windows, 2004) combines four felt-tip pen and India ink drawings recreating large vantage points over which characters lean out, paradoxically seeming to observe the viewer, as if fiction wanted to participate in reality and once again referring to the duality of space that so intrigues Bandera.
Nono Bandera’s work draws on popular iconography and plays with the ideas of folly, error, distortion, irony and humour. In doing so, the artist makes use of found images, trompe-l’oeil and bold settings which create an unusual and complex interplay of visual riddles characterised by the de-contextualisation of the objects represented.
BRAIN BOX DREAM BOX. PAUL MCCARTHY
19 November 2004-20 February 2005
FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION IN SPAIN
Brain Box Dream Box is the first solo exhibition by Paul McCarthy (born Salt Lake City, USA, 1945) in Spain. The show is an overview of the work of this artist that includes installations, videos and sculptures from the last ten years. These works enter into an intense dialogue with complete selection of about 200 drawings from 1967 to the present day. This exhibition has been organised with the collaboration of Hotel AC Málaga Palacio.
Paul McCarthy’s work only became known to a wider public relatively late. This is attributable in part to its ephemeral origins in performance art in the 1970s, and in part to McCarthy’s precisely staged, provocative defiance of certain taboos. Using exaggeration and satire, the artist flouts social conventions. He draws on a blatantly heightened vocabulary of sex and violence that lays bare before us the strata of our subconscious and a culture of consumption and entertainment that has long since ceased to be either appealing or innocent.
The exhibition at CAC Málaga is distinguished by the specific yet widely varied selection of works. Installations from recent years and a number of recent sculptures come together in a memorable sequence of spectacular spaces. At the same time, a highly focused, retrospective selection of drawings from 1968 to the present day – many never shown in public before – illuminates the conceptual background to McCarthy’s work. The drawings take the viewer through the artist’s preoccupations since the late 1960s. The title of the exhibition, Brain Box Dream Box, is not only an allusion to the artist’s reaction to Minimal Art with its stereometric objects, but also to his artistic modus operandi, guided both by reason and by the driving forces of the subconscious.
Brain Box Dream Box looks at a highly influential Postmodern œuvre and at the same time sheds light on the intuitive and conceptual aspects of Paul McCarthy’s art. The drawings openly reveal his thought processes and working methods, while the three-dimensional works elicit a physical response from the viewer. Reason and feelings are not mutually exclusive in McCarthy’s work – indeed they provide us with a comprehensive instrumentarium by which we may recognise our world.
The exhibition is completed with the videos Black & White Tapes (1970-74), Sailor’s Meat-Sailor’s Delight (1975), Bossy Burguer (1991), Painter (1996) y Wild Gone Girls (2003), to be shown in different sessions open to the public and free of charge.
Humour and irreverence
Humorous, ironic and irreverent, McCarthy’s work first came to attention in the 1970s with a series of performances and videos largely on the subject of human degradation, mutilation, perversion and scatological matters. From the mid-1980s he devoted himself consistently to sculpture, with a recent emphasis on large-scale inflatable works, such as the example exhibited outside the Tate Gallery in London last year.
In his work, McCarthy frequently uses an idiom and iconography drawn from North American consumer culture, from Disneyland to Hollywood as dream factory. His approach to these subjects, however, offers a new perspective, transforming these environments into disturbing and grotesque scenarios which draw our attention to the de-humanisation and brutality underlying the West’s apparent social equilibrium.
This exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven/The Netherlands and has been curated by Eva Meyer-Hermann.
TABLEAU. JANE SIMPSON
19 November-23 January
The beauty of the everyday, the evocative power of objects and the story which each enfolds and shelters is the main theme of the exhibition by the British artist Jane Simpson (born London, 1965) to be held at the CAC Malaga from 19 November. It comprises 10 works among sculptures, installations and photographs created from various materials, of which perhaps the most outstanding for its expressive powers and transient nature is her use of ice. This exhibition is sponsored by Monarch Scheduled and has the collaboration of AC Hotel Malaga Palacio.
Tableau refers to tableaux vivants, or “living pictures”, a custom dating back to ancient times and one that spread until the beginnings of the last century. As occurs in these hybrid representations, lying somewhere between the theatrical and the pictorial, Jane Simpson has created a setting in CAC Málaga in which immobile and frozen objects exhale restrained life and emotion.
In the exhibition, Jane Simpson explores the relationship between objects and memory, a concept that on occasions is deliberately confused with nostalgia. In this sense and within the artist’s exploration of the world of her materials, ice is revealed as a highly eloquent element about the passing of time and possesses, like the work of Simpson, contradictory traits: vulnerable and destructive, delicate and resistant, ephemeral and impenetrable.
Ice covers the hanging chandelier, the tables titled and Ice Storm (2003) and the sculpture Tivoli (2004). It is the main subject of the group of photographs called In Between (freezing and melting) lies passion 1-6 (2004) and of the work Ice Table (1996-2004).
Contradictions and Still Lifes
Simpson’s obsession with the expressive and sensory abilities of her materials is expressed in the exhibition by the work entitled Virgin Queen (2004), a very comfortable luxurious Chesterfield sofa on which, however, it is forbidden to sit. The voluptuousness and impregnability of the object contrast with the sobriety of the Tivoli cement, a type of lovers’ bench on which one is allowed to sit, although with the inconvenience of a refrigerated backrest covered in frost.
Finally, another highlight of the exhibition is a set of shelves upon which Jane Simpson has created, using a wide range of materials, a series of still lifes inspired by the work of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. On each of the shelves, the artist has placed, in the style of a family portrait, a series of objects evoking and claiming the full importance of all that is intimate, domestic and close.
Young British Artist
Jane Simpson’s work first became known in the now-celebrated exhibition Sensation in the early 1990s which brought together the work of the so-called YBA’s (Young British Artists). However, in contrast to the work of her fellow artists, Simpson’s art has avoided controversy and immediate effect to focus, as she explains, on humble and at first sight worthless objects.
For this reason her work focuses on objects from the domestic realm such as tables, chairs, lamps and pictures, treated as relics to evoke the person who used them. As Simpson says: “when I go to junk markets I always ask myself how things ended up there. These are things from people’s lives. They may simply have been thrown away, but there might also have been more tragic reasons. What I am really dealing with is nostalgia”.
STITCHES IN TIME. LOUISE BOURGEOIS
6 August- 7 November 2004
The CAC Malaga is presenting Stitches in Time, a group of recent works by Louise Bourgeois, one of the most influential artists of recent times. The linking thread between these works is that of woven cloth, which is used in the 20 or so works that comprise the exhibition. These are accompanied by a selection of graphic works by the artist, including He disappeared into Complete Silence (1946), her most important group of prints and poems in which she recounts stories of loneliness and loss.
Stitches in Time features 20 of Louise Bourgeois’s most recent creations, most dating from the last three years. They include small characters, life-size sewn busts, totemic figures and display case-cells. In all of them, cloth acts as a material imbued with symbolism, suggestive of her traumatic family past.
Born in Paris in 1911 when Cubism was at its height, Louise Bourgeois’s father was an antique dealer and tapestry restorer while her mother worked in the textile industry in Aubusson (France). Family harmony was ruptured with the arrival of an English governess who later became her father’s lover.
This relationship, and in particular the consequences it had for her mother, permanently marked Louise Bourgeois’s artistic career. Seven in a Bed, 2001, for example, seems to distil the artist’s memory of a far distant weekend mornings when she and siblings would tumble into bed with their parents, but the Janus-like addition of extra heads warns us that things, specially people, are not always what they seem.
Trained as a painter, Bourgeois began to work in sculpture in New York in 1938 after her marriage to the art historian Robert Goldwater. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she virtually abandoned painting and began to create a series of totemic figures in wood whose verticality evokes the human form. The artist has recently reinterpreted these early works, this time in cloth, represented in the exhibition by pieces such as Untitled 2001 and 2002.
Her first exhibition of sculpture took place in New York in 1949. Much later, at the age of seventy-one, Bourgeois was the first woman artist to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By then she had started to make a theatrical spaces entitled Cells, representing, as she explained, different types of pain -- “the physical, the emotional and the psychological, and the mental and the intellectual”. Constructed from a variety of materials gleaned mostly from urban skips and demolitions sites, the Cells are self-contained or partial enclosures which can be experienced either by entering the space or by encountering it close up through mesh walls, doors or windows. Evoking both the punishment cell of the prison and the contemplative cell of the convent, these are spaces for solitary contemplation and self-reflection.
Fabric heads and graphic work
Some of the most arresting of Bourgeois’ recent works are a series of extraordinary upright and front-facing fabric heads, of which five can be seen in the exhibition. Sewn with a crudeness that belies their structural sophistication, they are nevertheless uncannily lifelike – open mouths appear moist from exhalation and their eyes apparently focus directly on the viewer or seem to deliberately glance away. These are difficult works to confront; a difficulty compounded by the mute and resistant glass cases which encase them.
Stitches in Time is completed by the series of prints What is the shape of the problem? (1999), Topiary, the Art of Improving Nature (1998), and He disappeared into Complete Silence (1947). The latter is perhaps her most important work in this field. In it, architectural structures, some with openings resembling balconies and windows, are juxtaposed with short texts that relate an inexplicable tale of privation and of lack of communication. Although the recall the skyscrapers of Manhattan, as some critics have suggested, these drawings remain as mysterious and unyielding as the texts that accompany them.
The oldest of the young artists
Louise Bourgeois is one of the first artists to affirm the importance of autobiography and identity as subjects of art. Throughout her career – one that defies a linear reading – she has shown herself to be a sculptor of startling originality, with a unique ability to work in different materials, from marble and bronze to latex and cloth.
Bourgeois has thus been a pioneer in the use of installation as a means of involving the public in the experience of art. She has been one of the most influential artists on contemporary art since the late 1970s, while her continuing and tireless activity inspires and motivates new generations of artists.
As Frances Morris notes in the catalogue of the exhibition: “at the age of ninety-three, Louise Bourgeois remains the oldest of young artists”.
Stitches in Time has been organised by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and has the sponsorship of GM Comunicación.
DAVIDELFIN EXHIBITION
Odd Body
Two in one Me and the other
A collection that shows two sometimes veiled faces
A defence mechanism that protects us from the others, from ourselves
Unfolded clothes for an odd body
Odd Body is an exercise in reflection upon the eternal and universal struggle between the conscious and unconscious, of their victories and defeats and the blurred line that separates them. In order that he might achieve this, David Delfín (born in Ronda, Málaga, 1970) and his team davidelfin have designed a vast "Black box" for the CAC Málaga that envelopes the viewer, drawing them into an intimate, mysterious space in which limits seem not to exist.
Immersed in this static emptiness, the projection of a ballet dancer can be seen through a series of mannequins. In this installation, the images and an almost mad dance show up this unfolding process that, at first, seems to limit itself to a psychic level before finally affecting the whole physical sphere that encompasses the spectators.
The combination of these elements, combined with the tension and anguish brought on by the audio soundtrack, serve to illustrate the inherent confrontation between the conscious and unconscious, provoking strong emotions in the viewer who forms a part of the piece.
The Odd Body installation is a further extension of the body of work that the artist DAVIDELFÏN has created, examining the application of psychic phenomena to fashion. This investigation into the mechanisms that govern the workings of the sub-conscious and its many manifestations throughout human behaviour has been one of Delfín's central themes that have been the inspiration for both his artistic and design work, two fields that, as so commonly occurs with mental states, fuse together to such an extent that its impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.
THE CHAPMANS, FIRST EXHIBITION IN SPAIN
THE MARRIAGE OF REASON AND SQUALOR
JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN
Next 30th April, CAC Málaga will host under the title The Marriage of Reason and Squalor the first solo exhibition in Spain by the Chapman brothers, Jake & Dinos (Cheltenham, 1966 and London, 1962). Famous for their shocking and provocative works and for their outstanding skills in drawing and sculpture, the are two of the most controversial artists working today.
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor has been curated by Fernando Francés, head of CAC Málaga and comprises a group of ten works made between 2000 and 2004. The exhibition is made up of four of the subjects prevailing in their work: the globalisation of consumerism, social taboos, the artistic process and the work of the universal Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.
Goya’s Disasters of War (1810-1820) have inspired Injury to Insult to Injury (2004), a new complete series of 80 engravings by the Aragonese painter that have, so the technical details record, been “worked and improved” by the artists. This is a new body of work that has never been shown to the public before and which follows on from the controversial Insult to Injury (2003), in which the brothers ‘rectified’ an edition of outstanding value of this visual chronicle of the horrors that took place during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain.
This same work by Goya is also the inspiration of the sculptural group entitled Sex I (2003), another life-size version, this time completed in bronze, of one of the most striking prints by the universally-acclaimed Spanish painter: Heroic Feat with Dead Men!. This piece, a dry tree trunk full of death and putrefaction, was exhibited at Tate Modern in London during the nomination of the Chapmans at the last edition of the Turner Prize.
This body of work connected to Goya finishes with their own reinterpretation of the Disasters of War. Under the same title, this series (2001) comprises eighty three handcoloured etchings with watercolour that show their vision about war and violence.
Viewer participation
Authenticity, originality and the creative process are the motifs of the two bronze sculptures from which the exhibition takes its name: The Marriage of Reason and Squalor I and II (2003). Last June this work won the annual Charles Wollaston award at the London Academy. Each of the two bronze sculptures, painted to look like clay, represents a figure fashioned in the manner of a police constable pig with elephant features.
The participation of the public will be an essential part for the installation known as The Rape of Creativity (2003-2004), a large-scale allegory of the artistic process, conceived as a perversion set within the Freudian battlefield of sex and death. The scene may appear chaotic: a large Aphrodite emerges from the base of a wooden trunk, a caravan is crowned with a McDonalds "M" is surrounded by dog excrement and other waste. In its interior pornography covers the walls, we can hear music and glimpse a figure modelled in clay... The occupant, now absent, is an artist who has severed his hand trying to do something beautiful. A hybrid dog with a sheep's head runs away with a cut hand in its mouth. Easels, canvases and paintings will invite the viewer to take part in the work. At the end of the show, the Chapmans will award the most interesting entry with one of their own etchings.
The 'M' symbol of the famous fast food chain also dominates the work Rizhome (2000), a model that recreates a miniature McDonalds drive-in restaurant and refers to the consequences that derive from globalization and the consumer society in which Man seems to be immersed today. In the same sense, the dictatorship of consumerism is the main theme of California Über-alles (2003), four large red banners that recall those that were used by the Nazis and on which the swastika is replaced with "Mr. Smiley". This work will be placed on the main façade of CAC Málaga.
The sculpture Death I (2003) links sex and death, alluding to la petite morte, the French expression to name the orgasm. At the same time, this piece suggests in an humoristic way the duality appearance-reality, as the viewer believes to be seeing two inflatable dolls in plastic which is actually a work in bronze.
A series of 83 etchings grouped together under the title of Gigantic Fun (2000) complete the exhibition. In these of their works the Chapmans reflect upon a number of social taboos in a humorous and provocative manner, appropriating imagery recovered from diverse sources within the history of art and today's consumer culture.
Young British Artists
The Chapman brothers are members of the YBAs generation – Young British Artists – that emerged in the late 1990s at the Sensation exhibition and that includes a total of 42 British artists, amongst them Tracey Emin, Mona Hauton, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Jane Simpson. All of them take an irreverent stance, defying the institutionalised society in which they work, championing an art of the depraved and the grotesque, all of it imbued with an air of irony and blasphemy that attacks our most deeply rooted taboos in order to make the individual viewer reflect on the world.
The work of Jake and Dinos Chapman has often aroused considerable debate within an international context. In an age of disbelief, when death, destruction and sex are usual on the media, the artists have answered their critics quite categorically: "anyone who is scandalized by our work is either a hypocrite or is sick".
DRAWINGS TODAY
6 April 2004
The CAC Málaga is hosting an exhibition from 6 April to 13 June entitled Drawings Today, which includes a total of 31 works by thirteen Spanish and international artists who all share an interest in line. The works are the outcome of the rich and complex evolution that took place in drawing over the last century to the point where it has now become a category in its own right in contemporary art.
Throughout the 20th century, drawing has developed from its status as a mere working tool for disciplines such as painting, sculpture and architecture in order to become a creative language with a perspective and raison d'être of its own.
Drawings Today will present the most contemporary manifestation of this development through a very surprising group of works characterized by its formal originality and its efficiency in the transmission of some contemporary social themes, such as violence, personality affirmation and changes in the landscape. As far as style is concerned, figuration clearly predominates over abstraction.
In the show renowned figures such as Ester Partegás, Pablo Alonso y Bernardí Roig are in the show together with young talents whose innovative work has irrupted onto the current art scene, such as Cristina Lucas, Gemma Paris, SEO, Yehudit Sasportas or Rafael G. Bianchi. “All the selected artists explore the functions of line as a boundary between the imaginary and the symbolic”, the art critic Gabriel Rodríguez declares in the exhibition catalogue.
The traditional pencil-on-paper combination is accompanied by others whose results will surprise the onlooker due to their originality and efficacy in terms of their composition of form and meaning. Mural drawing, drawing on In the works displayed, figuration prevails over abstraction. Particularly noteworthy is the original use of materials not commonly employed in figurative drawings, such as acrylic paint, tempera and marker pen, as well as the more usual pencil, combined with supports, many of them large-sized, which are even more unexpected in this kind of creative work, including methacrylate, video, wood and mirrors.
Line as a medium of expression
By combining these materials with their use of the line, Gemma París reproduces enigmatic women without faces; Rafael G. Bianchi creates an entire structure of signs that point to feelings such as grief or to death; Ester Partegás reflects her most private thoughts by means of a confrontation with the public space; Cristina Lucas considers the irrationality of human actions; Pablo Alonso arouses a sense of surprise in the midst of the everyday; Yehudit Sasportas probes the possibilities of the simple line in landscape work; Hans Hemmert reveals the person who wants to be named; SEO explores textures and chiaroscuros; Bernardí Roig presents someone who closes himself off from the outside world; Catie de Balmann draws outlines that verge on being sculptures; Stéphanie Nava investigates the frontier between interior and exterior; and Mónica Fuster and Nicholas Woods construct a mysterious, transparent wood.
As Rodríguez concludes, “the pure line continues to dazzle artists because it is the simplest, most direct field for experimentation; it is the hinge, the point of encounter where conflicts that have never been fully resolved can be resurrected”.
CARLOS DURÁN
15 March 2004
The exhibition, which presents a review of the most important periods in the artist's career, is the first in a series of exhibitions aimed at highlighting the work of a number of outstanding contemporary Malagan artists within this cultural centre run by Malaga's Local Council.
This exhibition on Carlos Durán (Málaga, 1949) brings together a total of ten paintings produced between 1981 and 2001, which reflect the most characteristic aspects of his work. These paintings present the complex development his work has undergone since he began his artistic career as part of the movement known as New Figuration, alongside artists such as Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Chema Cobo.
The practice of painting and its relationship with reality, landscape and still-lifes are the three preoccupations around which Durán's work revolves. Through these themes the painter reflects upon the blurred boundaries between exterior and interior, reality and subjectivity, past and present, the world and its depiction.
The activity of the painter and the specific relationship he maintains with his surroundings is the main motif of Taller ("Workshop") (1981), Sin título ("Untitled") (1982) and El pintor y la modelo ("The Painter and the Model") (1983). In these paintings we can observe symbols and metaphors which Durán has frequently turned to throughout his career, such as the square within a square, shadows, the window and reflections.
Landscape, possibly the most prolific theme pursued by Carlos Durán, is the genre he employs to evoke the idea of travel (De Mystras a Via Giulia, 1993) and, above all, to recreate a Málaga in which fantasy, reality and nostalgia are combined, as occurs in the human memory itself (Villa Maya, 1997 and Interior 1998). El Monte Sancha, El Limonar and Gibralfaro are just some of the locations that can be easily recognized in these canvases which, with the Mediterranean forming a constant backdrop, provide a glimpse of a highly poetic conception of space, its inhabitants and how the passing of time can transform them.
Still-Lifes
Mesa del Pintor (Painter's Table") (1990) and Murano (2001) are the most significant examples of Durán's incursion within the field of still-lifes, a genre in which his use of symbols multiplies and the meanings presented are not always explicit. In the first work, an apparently unstable table supports a constellation made up of a heart, a large shell, an eye, a book, a vase and a number of fish, once again touching upon the theme of the painter's capacity to represent reality.
The second work, entitled Murano, is the consequence of a prolonged stay in the legendary city of Venice. Avoiding obvious resources, Durán creates a portrait of the most unique and exquisite aspects of the city through the use of one of his favourite materials: glass. Taking advantage of the qualities of this material, its reflections and its forms, the painter once again investigates, as he did in his landscapes, the melancholy idea of past splendour, the charm of what is old and the fragile-as-glass character that time imposes on all things.
Carlos Durán studied Architecture in Madrid and Valencia, a training that has had |
