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Colectiva Colectiva

NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ presents the exhibition ‘Colectiva Colectiva’, with artworks from the gallery’s archives under a collective and public curatorial selection, during the first two weeks of January and through the gallery’s Instagram profile.

The guidelines for the project consisted in a series of introduction questions, followed by the possibility to choose between two selected artworks from the gallery’s collection.

The result is the group of artworks with the best votes by the followers, in an effort to democratize the exhibition space and involve the public with the contents shown, gathering artworks by renowned artists.

Alfonso Albacete (Antequera, Málaga, 1950), his work is usually located in the intersection between abstract and figurative art, departing from a strong color scheme in the record of memories of moments, places and experienced sensations.

Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012), considered one of the maximum exponents of Informalism in the world, he is one of the most distinguished Spanish artists in the 20th century.

Equipo Crónica (1694-1981), was an artistic group founded by Manolo Valdés (1942) and Rafael Solbes (1940-1981). Their production is related to the last period of Francoism and the beginning of the democratic transition.

José Luis Alexanco (Madrid, 1942), is part of the generation of artists that succeeded El Paso and Grupo Hondo, that dominated the Spanish avant-gard from mid-1960’s.

José Manuel Broto (Zaragoza, 1949), the Neo-figurative art practiced by this artist is influenced by the proposal of the French group, Suport(s)-Surface(s). In his works there prevail balances and strains between colors and shapes.

Manuel Quejido (Seville, 1946), considered on the most prominent artists of a generation that, in the mid-1970’s, advocated for figurative art.

Xa­vier Grau (Barcelona, 1951), his works claim the pictorial practice from an abstract background, keeping an internal strain between color and drawing, without reducing neither the liveliness of color nor the movement of its surfaces in a rhythmical formal structure.

Mauro Giaconi. Tiene un destino de nube

MAURO GIACONI (Argentina, 1977)

NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ presents Mauro Giaconi’s, (Argentina, 1977, lives and works in Mexico) first solo exhibition in Spain.

‘Tiene un destino de nube’ [Has the fate of a cloud], whose title detaches from a song by the Uruguayan singer-songwriter Alfredo Zitarrosa, ‘El corazón de mi pueblo’ [My people’s heart], is an exhibition that explores Giaconi’s most recent works, a production that includes an extensive series of drawings on second-hand book pages, and an installation made with the rests of a building located at a corner of Chimalpopoca and Bolivar’s streets in Mexico City, one block away from the artist’s studio, prior to the latest earthquake that shook the city on September 19th, 2017.

In this exhibition, the works of Giaconi explore and reflect on the tensions between memory, deceit, territory, fragility, and appearance, manipulating and transforming objects in an effort to multiply their meanings and generate polysemic images. These images, in turn, are to be completed by the public, through their bodies, their experiences and their own decisions. In this sense, the audience will have the opportunity to transform, by chance or fate, the experiences and landscapes of the exhibition.

The ruins of the building that collapsed during the earthquake are a starting point for Giaconi, who intervenes this rubble and mixes it with other debris found in Madrid. This action proposes a confusion between reality and fiction, and memory and deceit. The rubble with no historical burden is ordinary, recovered from random constructions, whereas the one intervened by the artist has a powerful narrative related to the natural disaster and the negligence of a corrupt system that, ultimately, culminated in the death of dozens of migrant women who previously lived there, undocumented and exploited by trafficking.

In another dual operation, Giaconi presents artworks in which he decomposes books sold by their weight, rather than their contents. These books are no longer information container, but recycling or decoration material. The artist dismantles these objects, subverts their contents, rearranges them without hierarchy and intervenes them using graphite, pigments and eraser. The result of this creative process is a formal cloud that plays with the margins of the book pages and alters the perception of theses ordinary objects.

Mauro Giaconi has had solo exhibitions at BMocA (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art), MAMBA (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), Museo Universitario del Chopo, and group shows at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Centro Cultural Recoleta and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. His works are included among collections such as: SPACE Collection, OMI International School of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, in the USA, and Colección Jumex, in Mexico. Furthermore, Giaconi has been awarded with several prizes, such as: Phillips Prize for Young Talents, within the Argentina and Latin America’s rounds, Painting Salon UADE, Argentina’s National Drawing Salon, and ArteBA–Petrobrás Prize in Argentina.

Pipo Hernández Rivero. Lounge

PIPO HERNÁNDEZ RIVERO (Telde, Gran Canaria, 1966)

The works of Pipo Hernández Rivero pose questions on all kinds of cultural convictions. Pointing out the complexity of the different possibilities of 21^st century painting, challenging the borders of pictorial expression and the perception of value for the artistic object, as well as, pushing its traditional notions, his work reframes the pictorial means from formal and conceptual structures under which underlay references to the failure of cultural avant-gardes.

Lounge, his second solo exhibition at NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ, plays with shifting the presumed roles for the artwork itself and, most especially for painting, within the household environment. Pipo Hernández Rivero hijacks several elements from Art History until traditional components of the domestic setting, aiming ultimately to disturb the cognitive order established for works of art. In this sense, through a set of meaning alterations, the works displayed transport the observer to a domestic scene, where the artworks inhabits a space of intimacy, subverting its own public and exhibitive nature.

Lounge gathers works that bring closer the social dimension of art and the domus environment, in which familiarity translates into sheltering to the audience and, at the same time, into a problem to the art. The materials applied refer to these privacy dynamics, such as the typical kitchen or bathroom tiles or even the books mainly used for fulfilling living room shelves, which fundamentally establishes links to a comfort zone misplaced from its usual territory.

Therefore, Lounge transforms the exhibition space and bursts it, providing another aspect as an accepted leisure space in which prevail adjectives such as pleasant, smooth and cozy.

This exhibition is part of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend. For further information on its general program, click here.

Jose Luis Landet. Estar siendo. Bajo una bandera ajena

JOSÉ LUIS LANDET (Argentina, 1977)

José Luis Landet’s work is conceived as a space where several modes of operating and assimilating cultural processes occur, crossed by social, political and ideological actions. His interest is centered on investigating sociocultural remains and wastes, as it could be seen through the retrieval of romantic and bucolic oil paintings from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, commonly made by amateur painters, the so called “Sunday painters”. In this sense, Landet’s work looks for a certain notion of paradise, recreating apocryphal.

The different materials that compose his works may be these pictoric representations, as well as other simbolic elements such as daily objetcts, photographies, letters, postcards, transparencies, writings, magazines and books, generating material and conceptual deconstructions.

The work of José Luis Landet reveals not only the materiality of its elements, but also its burden of memory, time and use. Likewise, each artistic project is embedded of especificities and, therefore, require a complex creative action from the artist, beginning at classification up until archiving, through cutting, breaking, covering, forging, soaking, fragmenting and simulating.

In this sense, the metaphorical-poetic actions of José Luis Landet are expressed in fronteer zones, between public and private, utopian past and distopian present, silence and communication and, even, a universalizing history and gestures for the historiagraphic reframing from a local context.

Chiharu Shiota. Remind of…

“I was given these wooden parts of brushes from a workshop in Switzerland that had to close after having existed for 136 years. The owner was about to retire and despite looking for a successor for years, he couldn’t find a person to continue the workshop. I like that the brushes come in so many different shapes for different uses and look like individuals because of that. They are hairless brushes that are not in use, that were waiting to be prepared by human hands in the shelves of the store for many years. I am thinking about all that while I am connecting them with my thread and give them a new life”.

Heir of Ana Mendieta and a whole generation of feminist artists form the early 70’s, Chiharu Shiota works with her body as an intervention space, realizing performances that deal with our link with the earth, the past and the memory. Well known for her installations with thread as main material, her symmetric tangles captivate the spectator at first sight, creating feelings that go between safety and fear, fascination and ugliness, while awakening memories, and both absence and existence as philosophical matters.

The presence and absence of her body is the thread running through her work, and ultimately is what makes it possible to understand her confrontation with the question of defining the artwork, the artistic subject and the public, the interior and exterior space.

In Shiota’s philosophy the true artwork is created only when the expectations for familiar artistic forms of expression are abandoned in favor of a perception of things that get by without any attributions of meaning.

2057

MICHEL FRANÇOIS

MARCIUS GALAN

HELEN MIRRA

ANTONIO VEGA MACOTELA

In 1977 Nieves Fernández opened Yerba in Murcia. With a clear critical and political character, the Gallery has been working during all these years, representing both national and international artists, being part of the contemporary art debate.

Confronting the challenge of a second generation gallery, we don’t want to commemorate what we have been, but instead celebrate the opening of a gallery that will turn 40 years more and will do so working and enjoying with the most fascinating contemporary artists. Those we felt for, and who, without any doubt, will write a chapter of the upcoming art history.

It is not about exploring a theme, but a utopia. However, all the artists presented in 2057 have implicit in their interventions the idea of sketch, and that the most important is not the final result but the process and its possible consequences, related with fate, essay and mistakes.

From the conceptual tradition, the exhibited works materialize or dematerialize in front of our eyes, questioning the limits, and the boundaries of the space, and, by extension, the sociopolitical system we inhabit. They are works that move, through an extreme graphic and formal simplicity, at the borders of the usual systems of representation.

Based in action, contact changes and the duality between control and the ungovernable, the conscious process of taking decisions every day, the space, and chance. After all the course over time.

Art is a motor of change and if we want to rethink the future, we have to stimulate imagination and, for this, nothing better than please ourselves inviting you to a trip, start ourselves a trip. For no other reason, but the pleasure of our ideal show.

Michel François, 1956 Belgium, has represented Belgium at the Venice biennial, and has exhibited in museums and institutions like the MACBA in Barcelona, SMAK of Ghent, the Centre Pompidou at Paris, Casa Wabi in Mexico, or the Miro Foundation in Barcelona. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions such as Documenta IX (1992), the São Paolo Biennial XXII (1994), Maison Rouge in Paris, Foundation Boghossian, Kunstmuseum of Bonn and Sonsbeek. Together with Ann Veronica Janssens he contributed to The Song (2009) by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Other collaborations with De Keersmaeker include En Atendant (2010) and Partita 2 (2013).

Marcius Galan, 1972 EEUU, has participated in group exhibitions at institutions and biennales including: the 29th and 30th editions of the São Paulo Biennale, 8th Mercosul Biennale and Biennale of the Americas (MCA, Denver, USA), Inhotim, Palais de Tokio, Paris, Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia, the Musee d’Art Contemporaine de Lyon, or the Guggenheim d of Bilbao.

Helen Mirra, 1970 EEUU, has participated at the biennials of Sao Paolo and Venice, and realized solo institutional exhibitions including  Culturgest, Lisboa, KW, Berlin, the Whitney Museum of American Art,  the Dallas Museum of Art, Kunstverein in Munich, the renaissance society in NYC, o the MIT of  Massachussets.  She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions as the Hammer Museum in LA, the Houston Museum, the New Museum in NYC, the Kunstverein, Hambourg, CA2M and Casa Encendida in Madrid…

Antonio Vega Macotela, 1980 México, has participated in documenta 14, Manifesta 9 and the biennials of Istanbul, New Orleans, and Sao Paolo. Institutions as the Paláis du Tokio, París, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and the Museo Carrillo Gil, México, CIFO, Miami, o Rijksakademie in Ámsterdam has exhibited his work.

Unexpected Moves

Alexej Meschtschanow examines the physical and aesthetic qualities of established social conventions through sculpture and installation. Studying our immediate social environments with an analytic and compassionate eye, he assembles found objects, derelict furniture and archival photography.

His work focuses on the imaginative potential and psychological depths involved in the construction of identities, compulsion toward self-realization and the socially driven urge for optimization.

With a work characterized by the gesture of holding, retaining, and attaching, from 2017 symbols of movement have incorporated to his language. In a time when it seems we have accomplished the dream of absolute mobility, when the movement of humans, goods or even social imperatives is no longer a great challenge, Unexpected Moves offers a tragicomic and abstract vision about the different realities that move humanity.

Danica Phelps. The Gratitude Project

Danica Phelps new project begins with an auction of her own works through social media to raise funds for several nonprofit organizations. The second generation of each drawing will be exhibited at Untitled San Francisco within a drawing depicting the work of each nonprofit. A growing net a drawings, a statement, and a fight. Art as motor of change.

“This project came out of the hours that I spend making my work and listening to the BBC and NPR telling the harrowing stories of refugees trying to make their way out of war and terror into some kind of safe life.  I felt that I had to do something to help.  My main skill is art making, so I started auctioning drawings on Facebook as a way to raise money for organizations who are working to help.  This has morphed into a project to address all kinds of issues that are important to me.  And now with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, I feel that there are domestic issues that I would like to make a contribution to as well.  Each drawing depicts something in my (rather mundane) everyday life.  The organization which is the recipient of the auction proceeds is chosen to pair with each drawing in a meaningful way.  The result of each transaction is a diptych which shows the work that the organization does in drawings next to a tracing of the drawings of my everyday life that were sold as a result of the auction”.

The work of Danica Phelps gathers conceptual precedents not only by taking in account economy as a main theme of her work but also in the own practice of the data capture, the exhaustiveness, and in the record of the facts that have been a main feature of conceptual art.

Since 1996 Danica Phelps has been documenting all her income and expenses through drawings in a system that becomes increasingly layered and complex.

Fritzia Irizar. La historia del humo

At early XIX century a bloody war of independence explodes in México and took the lives of thousands of people. One hundred years later, a new war deranges the country under a different premise: Mexican revolution starts, along with so many other similar revolutions, the violent XX century and the devastation left in its path. Almost a century later, with horrifying mathematical symmetry, it begins a new war: the combat against drug cartels and organized crime, a war that left the dismal amount of over hundred thousand mortal victims along the nation.

On April 26, 1937, a Blitz was performed (later it will be considered as a clear example of a war crime) by the German and Italian armies as a way of support to the uprising side which fought against the government of the Spanish Second Republic.Eighty years after that terrible event in Guernica, Russia attacks the Aleppo, Syria, area with aerial bombardments as a new offensive against the opponents of the regime. It seems to be that history tries to repeat itself or rather that we endeavor to repeat it.

Fritzia Irízar’s work approaches war as an act of barbarism that we keep repeating century after century, as if we fail to understand the mistakes of our past in order not to commit them again, that is, we continue to make the same decisions guided by selfish, perverse and ambitious interests; the clearest and most influential of all of them: money.

This is perhaps a consideration that was not taken into account in The Wealth of Nations, a beautiful economic utopia that functions as the basis for the neoliberal capitalist system, which gives full freedom to the market, in the hope that for a reason (an invisible hand) the economic system thrives. Evidently, the current facts shout that this is not the case.

Fritzia’s discourse tells us about a market that has been sustained by that decaying economic system that arises from Adam Smith’s analysis of the origin and causes of prosperity, a market that has enriched a few at the expense of the life of millions and has responded to the political interests of the great world powers: the war market. Her work becomes a protest against all those hidden purposes that fuel warlike conflicts, and seeks a last claim through art, a pure art that has not yet been corrupted by mercantile or economic purposes, an exploration and analysis, through language, of the critical state in which society finds itself: such pure art is poetry.

Leonardo González

Fritzia Irizar, Culiacán, Mexico, 1977, she has exhibited in institutions like Sala Siqueiros of Ciudad de Mexico, Museo de Arte Zapopán, or Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She has participated in the biennial of Mercosur at PortoAlegre, the biennial of FEMSA and group exhibitions at CA2M, CIFO Fundacion Fontanals Cisneros, Miami, Fundación Giorgio Cini, Venezia,  Museo Rufino Tamayo or Fundacion Banco Santander among others.

Rafael Grassi. En el huracán del ojo

Resbala el suelo bajo el firme pie del sabio
Lo pesado vuela y lo ligero sin embargo

Del seísmo de las cosas
Surge el tremor de la mirada

Cuando la certeza desfallece
Germina certera,
Sin escrúpulo, la duda

Absurda, luminosa, indiferente
Llanamente existiendo para nadie

Ahora o fresas
Como una mañana sin canto
Rodado

Sin verlo persigue el huracán su ojo

Cielo enterrado
En el Infierno la Gloria

Visto lo visto
Casi me alegro de mi exilio

También anidan las flores en la boca del lobo