Balaguer Gallery from Barcelona in Art Madrid\'15

Balaguer Gallery from Barcelona in Art Madrid\'15

Jan 19, 2015

art madrid

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".

 
 

 

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exhibitions

The CEART opens this Thursday, November 14th in the room A an exhibition dedicated to this master of photography, which will be open to the public until February 9th. The show includes one of the artist's latest projects, focused on the hard work carried out by the miners of Serra Pelada, an open gold mine in the heart of Brazil where employees daily risked their lives.

Immigration, poverty, marginal life, slave labour, man's relationship with the land, the use of natural resources... are issues that have always fascinated Salgado. From the beginning of his career as a photographer, his work has opted to give visibility to the most disadvantaged groups and to create with his images a vivid and impressive visual story without fakes. With a raw black and white, this author's work transits between photo-reportage and naturalistic photography.

And the idea that permeates all his work is human dignity. Salgado portrays employees, miners and gatherers from a purely humanistic approach that wants to value their integrity, their strength and their resilience.

“If you photograph a human, so that he is not represented in a noble way, there is no reason to take the picture. That is my way of seeing things.”

Salgado entered this discipline long after completing his studies in economics between Brazil and the United States, and a doctorate in statistics in France. But in 1973 his life took a turn, and he decided to start his career as a photographer. He achieved to work at the Gamma Agency and Magnum Photos for more than 15 years until in 1994 he founded his own agency “Amazonas Imagen”.

With the “Gold” project, the photographer portrays a harsh reality that takes place in the Serra Pelada mine, a name given to a totally devastated and anarchically excavated mining enclave, the world's largest open-pit gold mine, through which more than 50,000 people have passed. In the heat of the legends about the mysterious “El Dorado”, the enthusiasm for this precious metal led to the development of strenuous exploitation practices for the workers and to originate tales of grief and glory, of human victory and defeat between the soil, the tunnels and the cargo baskets.

The CEART exhibition brings together Salgado's full portfolio in his characteristical black and white and large-format photographs that leave no one indifferent.

 

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