Art Madrid'26 – Café Lehmitz in pictures, a vivid experience

Anders Petersen. Café Lehmitz. 1967-1970

 

 


In this occasion, PhotoEspaña 2017 has given `carte blanche´ to the renowned photographer Alberto García-Alix to design an exhibition with his influential artists, in order to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Festival. These selected artists will show their works in Círculo de Bellas Artes, Museum of Romanticism and CentroCentro Cibeles. They are Antonie d'Agata, Pierre Molinier, Paulo Nozolino, Teresa Margolles, Karlheinz Weinberger y Anders Petersen.

 

 

 

Anders Petersen. Café Lehmitz. 1967-1970

 


Anders Petersen (Stockholm, 1944) approached to art through painting and writing, and after meeting Christer Ströholm he started with photography. He studied in several art schools in Stockholm and collaborated as a photographer in numerous swedish publications. He worked as a teacher at the Cinema and Photography University of Gothemburg, Sweden. Petersen has received numerous grants and rewards since the seventies, and regularly organises workshops and exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia and in the USA. In 1978, he published `Café Lehmitz´ in Germany. With this book he reached international recognition and the information that it presents is enhanced by the photographs in the current exhibition.

 

 

Anders Petersen. Café Lehmitz. 1967-1970

 

 

Anders Petersen´s photographs describe in a very human and familiar way the life of Café Lehmitz, a bar that the artist found in Hamburg's Red Light District. This local was the meeting point of prostitutes, transvestites, drug addicts and indigents. There, they developed their life stories and relationships, in which the artist took part during three years. He developed his project between 1967 and 1970 and when it was finished was exhibited for the first time on the same bar. This project was considered a key element in european urban photography.

 

 

Anders Petersen. Café Lehmitz. 1967-1970

 


CentroCentro offers the visitor the chance of becoming part of Café Lehmitz´s extraordinary world, living a night with its extravagant protagonists throughout the exhibition. It can be visited on the fifth floor until September 17th.

 

 


ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. CICLO DE PERFORMANCE X ART MADRID'26


Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.


PERFORMANCE: OSCURECER UN PAPEL. BY ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

March 5 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.


Nocturnality. Installation. Rocío Valdivieso..


Oscurecer un papel forms part of a series of actions in which the artist engages in reading through repetition, memorization, and a measured degree of improvisation. Within this framework, a non-linear mode of reading emerges from a written text that is transformed when spoken aloud, assuming a different form in the act of articulation. The texts stem from an ongoing investigation into materiality, space, the relationships between body and matter, writing, the sculptural, and a sustained interest in the exploration of voice and orality.

The material from which Oscurecer un papel is constructed consists of a collection of purchase receipts the artist has been accumulating over time. The printed text they contain, together with the action of bringing them into proximity with a heat source—thereby activating the thermal paper on which they are produced—generates meanings that revolve around the notions of consumption and wear.


Rocío Valdivieso. Latent Aura. Performance documentation.


ABOUT ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

Rocío Valdivieso is an artist, researcher, and cultural manager. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. She holds an MA in Research in Artistic Practices from the University of Castilla–La Mancha (UCLM) and a BA in Fine Arts from the National University of Tucumán, Argentina. She was a Fundación Carolina fellow from 2022 to 2023. She currently co-directs Errática. Laboratory of Processes and Critique in Madrid, alongside Romina Casile.

She was part of the PEEPA 2023 Program at the Centro de Residencias Artísticas, Matadero Madrid. She completed the 2021/22 Artists Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, and in 2020 participated in the Intensive Curatorial Program of Proyecto PAC at Galería Gachi Prieto, Buenos Aires. She received the Visual Arts Promotion Award at the 4th Visual Arts Week of the Ente Cultural de Tucumán. She was awarded an AUGM scholarship for an exchange residency at UNESP, São Paulo, Brazil. She also participated in the International Residency Program La Ira de Dios and in the Acéfala Galería Residency for Argentine artists.