The gallery from Madrid Marita Segovia will exhibit in Art Madrid, a selection of the art work by four artists with different identities and artistic discourses but with clear aesthetic, formal and symbolic connections. Abstraction and geometry define the work of these four contemporary creators: Anke Blaue, Eduardo Martín del Pozo, Lourdes García O'Neill and Manolo Ballesteros.

The colour field paintings is one of the many movements of the American abstract expressionism, its greatest exponent being Mark Rothko. The compositions in the "colour field paintings" are characterized by large flat surfaces combined with colour which different shades of light are played with. The artist Anke Blaue (Germany, 1967), goes beyond the chromatic game and creates, without impediment, a spontaneous communication through the visual effect produced by the inherent characteristic of the material used.

The blues, greens, reds and yellows chosen by Blaue become more solemn as they are embodied on pieces of antique linen, patiently superimposed one on the other, creating compositional lines of extreme subtlety that, together with the granulate characteristic of the fabric, produce a special agitation and sensation of abyss.

Anke Blaue

AB479, 2018

Tela sobre tela

160 x 160cm

Anke Blaue

AB476, 2018

Óleo sobre lino antiguo

130 x 150cm

The colour planes are also a constant in the art work of Manolo Ballesteros (Barcelona, 1965), who usually combines a maximum of two colours in his works. Ballesteros tries to find himself. For him "painting is a way of thinking, it never has a concrete meaning. What it does have is musicality, it tends to spirituality because of the rhythm, the spaces and the tones of colour".

In his gouaches on paper he creates geometric shapes that subtly take over the canvas, creating capricious forms. During the last few years his art work has experimented in the domain of abstraction, playing with geometric complexity through the uniformity of pigments and the reduction of profiles. As a result of these investigations his most recent work reflects the convergence of rounded shapes on monochromatic backgrounds where the viewer is trapped in an energetic and dynamic art.

Manolo Ballesteros

Pajarita, 2019

Gouache on paper

111 x 91cm

Lourdes García O'Neill

Sin Título, 2019

Oil on canvas

192 x 178cm

In the compositions of Lourdes García O'Neil, we see again reminiscences of some artistic tendencies belonging to the American expressionist movement. The artist from Seville, combines in her large format canvases, abstract forms of different colours. Through colour and form, and letting herself be carried away by feeling, in her most recent work she achieves a synthesis that discards any insubstantial element previously contained in it.

In some of García O'Neil's works, the forms are diluted in the plane, moving us to the "blocks of colour" of the American artist Helen Frankenthaler. Without falling into their geometry, her production can suggest Equipo 57 because of the loose and fragmented line.

Eduardo Martín del Pozo

2017.53, 2017

Pigmentos en emulsión acrílica y vinílica sobre papel

94 x 64cm

Eduardo Martín del Pozo (Madrid, 1974) is perhaps the most figurative of the four artists. In some of his works, we find simulated spaces, while in others, such as "2017.53", these spaces fade away and become weightless and imprecise. "2018.24" shows us how Martín del Pozo accentuates the indetermination of the configuration of his work, accentuating the purity and definition of his gesture, which causes it to originate a framework hanging on the surface of the support.

Martín del Pozo's research is based on the relationships that can be established between the plastic arts and other manifestations, specifically music. The artist plays with rhythm, repetition and symmetry as if his works were musical structures.

One of the purposes of the “Art Madrid-Proyector’20” program was to offer the opportunity to get to know the work of some invited creators, and, through an interactive talk, allow the public to open a direct dialogue with them. For this reason, from February 12th to 14th, were organised three masterclasses at Medialab Prado with Patxi Araújo, Olga Diego and Lois Patiño, all authors who work with the moving image, but who approach their projects from a diametrically opposite perspective. With this agenda, we were able to discuss three essential lines of current video-creation: the fusion with technology and artificial intelligence, the shaping of performances for documentary purposes and video art with film overtones. We already had the opportunity to remember the session with Patxi Araújo and his site-specific work "Sherezade" created for the Medialab Prado façade. Today we will talk about the meeting we had with Olga Diego and Lois Patiño.

Olga diego, photo by Javier Adiego

Olga Diego’s masterclass has as title: “The flight as a creative matter”. Olga is a multidisciplinary artist who in recent years has focused her work on sculpture and performance or action art, which she later documents with photography and video. This last aspect is one of the most interesting for her when she reflects on how the transformation of the piece from an experiential format to a recorded one takes place, and how individuals have become used to consuming this class of less invasive final products, from a space of comfort that our private devices offer.

One of Olga's main lines of research is related to autonomous flight systems and the creation of artefacts capable of rising with little energy. Can one create a material lighter than air itself? This idea has led her to experiment with numerous scientific forms and concepts, as well as taking a historical journey through the beginnings of flight and the progress of humanity to invent devices capable of flying. It is not just about recovering the history of aviation, something that has a much more technological and commercial side, but to investigate the ideas, experiments and tests that analysed the behaviour of air, the dynamics of flows and the design of individual aerodynamic structures, a concern that the human being showed since the Renaissance, with Leonardo Da Vinci.

Olga Diego, photo by Mario Gutiérrez Cru

Olga recovers many of these concepts and applies them to her recent projects. In her latest proposals, she has also worked with inflatable figures, as an alternative to conducted flight, using plastic materials for its construction. Her last exhibition “The automatic garden”, which could be enjoyed at the Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art and the Lonja del Pescado Exhibition Hall, also in Alicante, is a gigantic installation made up of almost a hundred inflatable-electronic sculptures inspired by the beautiful, extravagant and suggestive characters from the Garden of Earthly Delights, by El Bosco. This cloud of humanoid and zoomorphic figures, which move and beat thanks to the electronic mechanisms that keep them permanently inflated, also portrays the excesses of man, his lack of concern for the invasion of the environment, the overexposure to plastic and the exploitation of natural resources. A composition that focuses on "sin", as an indirect message that was also conveyed in the work of El Bosco.

Masterclass of Lois Patiño. Photo by Marta Suárez-Mansilla

For his part, Lois Patiño's career is intimately connected to film work. “Time and image” was the title of his masterclass. His video pieces, whether brief or feature-long films contain a concern closely linked to film language, but on a path that leaves conventional narratives aside. Among the main motifs that occupy his work, Lois opts for more contemplative aesthetics, where the expressive power of the image itself is prioritised, without seeking too many added effects in conventional cinema through sound effects, dialogues or other devices.

This is why Lois's work is so poetic and lyrical. His proposals incorporate technological innovations to cause very concrete effects in his works, but all of this helps to delve into the issues that concern this creator and that, since his beginnings, have been present in his work.

Lois Patiño, foto de Mario Gutiérrez Cru

Lois Patiño has always been interested in the relationship of the individual with the landscape and how it can modulate our way of behaving in society and determine our idiosyncrasy. To what extent are we dependent on our environment? How is culture defined by its connection to the landscape? These and other questions plague the author's work in which many contemplative images abound.

In addition, Lois presented us in scoop the trailer for his latest feature-long film "Lúa vermella" that a few days after the masterclass was officially presented at the Berlinale - International Film Festival in Berlin 2020.