Art Madrid'23 – Balaguer Gallery from Barcelona in Art Madrid\'15

Balaguer Gallery is placed in the heart of arts neighbourhood of Barcelona. The well known Consell de Cent street groups the principal exhibition rooms of the city, place where the gallery has moved in 2004, hardly two years after its opening in 2002.

 

One of the main working lines of the gallery is the support to young artists and the bet for variety of formats. In this sense, Balaguer includes in its room works of photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, engraved, video or performance. In this last discipline, the gallery has wanted to make the difference in its trajectory through an exhibition project that started in 2001. This initiative, curated by Ariadna Rodríguez, offers a performance cycle bimonthly that takes place in the gallery, activity that completes the varied offer of events that meet up in this space.

 
 

Cristina en Miami. Alejandra Atarés.

 

Balaguer joins this appointment of Art Madrid'15 with a strong proposal of an unique artist: Alejandra Atarés.

 

The work of this artist from Zaragoza is characterized by its liveliness of color and the election of an original leit motiv to assemble her series. In her last collection, Alejandra presents pieces in which appear backs of women facing several urban and natural landscapes. As the artist explains, it's a serie where we can appreciate an evolution from the portrait of people she needs to previously know, with a result near to reality, til the creation of characters immersed into fantastic and imaginary locations. It is about a new way of portrait in which the texture of cloths, in contrast with background, less plastic, gains a special expressive importance.

 
 

Primavera. Alejandra Atarés.

 

With words of the artist Mercedes Mangrané "The work of Atarés plays from the impertinence at laying out a reverse: it is not painting who gives us the back but its enigmas, that we must approach to find out. The look that we will never figure out, the faces (surely selfportraits of the artist) that hide their attitude, but that, as mirrors, are reflected in the landscapes of marvel (of tale) that, as spectators, we contemplate".

 
 

 

In the year 2020 in the heart of Barcelona a wandering gallery was born, the same one that in February 2021 would debut at Art Madrid with an exhibition proposal focused on contemporary portraits; with this subject matter it would manage to create a powerful dialogue between artwork and audience and make the seal Inéditad remain in the history of the event that contained it.

Jean Carlos Puerto. Protección. Oil and copper leaf on wood. 60 x 48. 2021. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Since that first time and until today, the wandering gallery has managed to build projects on otherness, has repositioned in the spotlight the discourses on the LGTBIQ+ collective, has consolidated a group of artists who share its principles of resilience and empathy and the best thing is that it continues to bet from the professionalism and commitment to give voice to the difference.

Claudio Petit-Laurent.. El Joven de la Perla. Oil on wood. 30 x 30 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Inéditad Gallery, thanks to its founder Luis López, its collaborators and the infinite possibilities manifested in the works of the artists it represents, is a gallery that has demonstrated its capacity and courage to stimulate the sensibility of the public through art and seduce a generation that moves between the glass window and the analogical story. Inéditad is a nomadic gallery that has gathered around it a community of artists and has moved the context with exhibition projects that think about LGTBIQ+ art without prejudices.

Pepa Salas Vilar. Las marcas del arcoiris. Oil on canvas. 40 x 50 cm. 2022. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Pride and Prejudice was inaugurated. An exhibition that brings together the works of sixteen artists: Abel Carrillo, Alex Domènech, Carlos Enfedaque, Silvia Flechoso, Jamalajama, Daniel Jaén, Claudio Petit-Laurent, Jean Carlos Puerto, Fernando Romero, Pablo Rodríguez, Pepa Salas Vilar, Jack Smith, Pablo Sola, Bran Sólo, Elia Tomás and Utürüo. Painting, illustration, photography and digital art are the manifestations that bring into dialogue around fifty neatly threaded pieces, in a discursive line that discusses such a latent phenomenon as discrimination. To achieve this, the artists invited to the exhibition question themselves whether: Does discrimination exist within the LGTBIQ+ collective?

Pride and Prejudice Official Poster. Image courtesy of the gallery.

With approaches on and from the body, the proposal invites to celebrate diversity, proposes to question and self-question the prejudices and attitudes of society against the collective. Pride and Prejudice is a space for dialogue about the constructs imposed on us by society. It is also an oasis in which to deconstruct with tolerance and respect the subjectivities that sometimes prevent us from approaching the production of the participating artists, simply because "the beautiful" does not fit in an androgynous body. The subjugation of stereotypes are pressed with determination to find the beauty of diversity in other palpable facets of reality.

Pablo Sola. All men are dogs. Photography. 2014. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Throughout these three years Inéditad has stimulated the vindictive projection towards bad practices, has questioned estates around the LGTBIQ+ body and the most admirable thing, is that these capacities have resurfaced around the dialogue and the visual narrative of the stories that are told from the visual: Artworks that are people, art that is, per se, humanity. Overcome impositions and accept what is different in order to continue fighting against homophobia, biphobia, lesbophobia or transphobia and defend the equal rights that all the acronyms of the collective deserve in our community.

That's Pride and Prejudice: One creature, the happiest in the world. And maybe other projects and other people have said it - or felt it - before, but none so fairly.

Silvia Flechoso. Hola, soy maricón. Oil on canvas. 73 x 54 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

From June 8th until June 22nd you can visit Pride and Prejudice. Carrer de Palau núm. 4. Canal Gallery space. Barcelona.