Art Madrid'23 – NEW HORIZONS: GALLERIES BEYOND EUROPE

Yiri Arts, Oda Gallery, Collage Habana, O-Art Project y Lola & Unicorn Galleries

  The fourteenth edition of Art Madrid stands out for its marked international character. Actually, the origin of the participating galleries cross oceans and go far beyond the European continent. Among the foreign participating galleries from the General Program, stand out the Taiwanese Yiri Arts (Taipei), the South African ODA Gallery (Franschhoek), the Cuban Collage Havana (Havana), the Peruvian artistic collective O-Art Project (Lima) and the North American Lola & Unicorn (New York). Galleries also beyond Europe are some of the ones that partake the One Project program: Flux Zone (Mexico City, Mexico), Granada Gallery (Comuna, Argentina) and RV Cultura e Arte (Salvador, Brazil).

Chen Yun, "The past is like the dust on the plants I collected before", acrylic on canvas, 2018. Yiri Arts.

From Taiwan, they come the proposals of Yiri Arts, works as intimate as vitalist. Chen Yun, the most mysterious of the three artists presented, features some of his latest paintings: compositions organised in a format of diptychs or triptychs in which the states of the inner worlds are revealed. Both human figures, most of them in meditative attitudes, as well as the symbols or the objects that accompany them, reflect veiled narratives. In these stories, it is expressed much more without telling everything because you can feel the inherent tension that underlies in titles such as “Companion. Smeared faces comforting one another, leaning upon each other” (2017) or “The past is like the dust on the plants I collected before” (2018).

Guim Tió Zarraluki, "Campament", oil on linen, 2018. Yiri Arts.

On the other hand, the most extreme tensions are completely explicit in the works by Lai Wei-Yu, as shown his furious and monstrous figures entwined in eager fights. The contrast reappears in these works through the introduction of vivid and almost playful colours, especially in works like "The Fight" (2018) or "My Family" (2018), where a kind of confetti hides the traces of violence. Yiri closes his proposal for Art Madrid with works by Guim Tió Zarraluki: paintings of large stains of spot colours that offer us a place to stop to reflect; a new space where we can be able to cleanse our corrupted vision by the visual tyranny imposed by the mass media.

Andy Llanes Bultó

Serie Cuerpo Celeste (II), 2018

Oil on canvas

150 x 150cm

Daniel R. Collazo

De la serie 'Ciudades infinitas', 2018

Charcoal on canvas

100 x 130cm

The proposals of the Collage Habana’s artists stand out for their mastery of pictorial techniques and drawing over colour. It is enough to contemplate the round-format-painting that articulates the series "Celestial Body" or "Levitaciones" (2018) of Andy Llanes Bultó, intimate exercises of anatomy; the charcoal drawings of infinite cities, always exponential, always dystopian, of Daniel R. Collazo; the female, provocative and idealised portraits of Roldán Lauzán Eiras; or the more mature, hybrid investigations of Ernesto Rancaño, games of lights and shadows, dreams and nightmares, which leave a sense of suspicion when contemplating its details.

Alessandra Rebagliati

Donut Wheel, 2018

Photography

20 x 70cm

Rocío Gómez

Extrañamiento, 2017

Óleo, collage y foto sobre cartulina

75 x 110cm

In this edition, the interesting Peruvian collective O-Art Project participates for the first time, a project lead by Alessandra Rebagliati, Jessica Schneider, Carolina Bazo and Gianna Pollarolo. The four artists have been carrying out projects for more than two decades. They aim to make visible the different practices and discourses that exist in the Peruvian art scene, managing to transcend and spreading "its roots from a globalised and contemporary perspective". Together with three other artists, they present in Art Madrid a suggestive selection of works, with very different imaginaries and concerns but under a collective vision. The works of these artists stand out for their hybrid and vindictive character, as seen in the works Carolina Bazo or Alessandra Rebagliati, focused on the reconfiguration of the stereotypes associated with women or the power exerted by the patriarchy and capitalist logic in our daily work.

Jessica Schneider

Yellow Capsule, 2017

Photography

35 x 45cm

We will also see the installations of metallic fibres and the transparencies of Cristina Colichón; the attractive works of Jessica Schneider, with her mysterious capsules adrift; or the photographic distortions of Jacques Custer. On the other hand, Gianna Pollarolo works around concepts such as energy, mysticism or the origins of the collective imagination; while Rocío Gómez is more interested in semiotic issues, as shown by the use of multi-vision in her impressive audiovisual works or the enigmatic stagings of painting, collage and photography, as we see in "Extrañamiento" (2017).

Samson Mnisi

Untitled, 2018

Oil on paper

107 x 78cm

Layziehound Coka

Bring Back The Power, 2018

Mixed media on canvas

250 x 200cm

Also for the first time, ODA Gallery participates in Art Madrid, a proposal that will allow us to enter a unique artistic scene of the African continent. We must highlight the oils on paper by Samson Mnisi (Lesotho), a creator whose language of patterns, lines, symbols and colours is as personal as inspiring; the reviews, and updates, of the local shapes and icons made by Jean-Baptiste Djeka (Ivory Coast), in which he combines painting, collage and photo-assembling; and the most critical readings of the sociopolitical state of the African citizen provided by Layziehound Coka (South Africa). ODA Gallery will also present the most traditional and magical paintings of Silas Adelanke Adeoye (Nigeria), geometric figures, flat and colourful, whose masks can lead us to the fascination that so many artists of the Avant-guards felt for the ancient African art.

Fernando Daza

Círculo naranja, 2018

Paper torn by hand and glued on fabric

80 x 80cm

Finally, from the heart of New York, comes the wide selection of Lola & the Unicorn. In his space, one can enjoy the abstract explorations of three artists: Bosco Sodi, a great connoisseur of Mexican muralism, whose paintings reflect the connections between the qualities of matter, textures and their echoes in spirituality; and the latest works by the Sevillians Isabelita Valdecasas and Fernando Daza, more material and textural in the paintings of the first one, more geometric and subtle in the fabrics of the latter.

Miguel Vallinas

Raiz 37, 2015

Photography

100 x 70cm

Juan Genovés

Analogía, 2016

Giclee on Hahnemühle paper

74 x 55.5cm

The gallery will also exhibit recent works by one of the great Spanish painters, Juan Genovés - also present in the Aurora Vigil Escalera space. From his characteristic figurative style, so close to the most gestural expressionist abstraction, and using his usual zenith perspectives, one can enjoy the endless crowd scenes which obsess the indefatigable painter that much. In addition, the selection of Lola & Unicorn will include the photographs of Miguel Vallinas, portraits with a marked surrealist character in which he reflects on contemporary identity: "what man wants to be, what he thinks he is, what others think of him and what we really are."

 

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.