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Ángela Cuadra
Spain, 1978

Ángela Cuadra investigates images related to concealment techniques used throughout recent history, conducting a broad phenomenological study of invisibility.

By examining the tensions between the natural and the artificial, the public and the private, the whole and the parts, the essential and the superfluous, the artist employs materials with pre-existing historical and semantic significance, transforming and reinterpreting them. Rooted in collage and approached intuitively, her works create compositions where the found material is barely altered, allowing forms to take center stage through their juxtaposition with other materials.

The special focus on the dialogue between fragments, and the emotion that arises from discovering harmonies of color, shape, or texture, makes the perception of her work resemble that of a musical composition. Creating language without literature, making music without melody, painting without paint. Building from what is given, from what is found on the margins.

She has exhibited at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Centro de Arte Joven, Centro Cultural Conde Duque, and CentroCentro in Madrid; Today Museum in Beijing; Centro del Carmen in Valencia; Sant Andreu Contemporani in Barcelona; Fundación Cultural de Providencia in Providencia (Chile); Fundación María José Jové in A Coruña; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) in Santiago de Compostela; International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana; Frans Masereel Centrum (FMC) in Kasterlee (Belgium); International Print Triennial Society in Krakow (SMTG) in Krakow; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMSU) in Rijeka (Croatia); and Foundation Tallinn Print Triennial (TPT) in Tallinn.

Ángela Cuadra
Evolving II
2021
Enamel and acrylic on glass
120 x 80 cm

4.600 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Sin título
2021
Mixed technique on wood
120 x 80 cm

4.000 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Sin título
2021
Acrylic on canvas
54 x 45 cm

2.500 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Sin título
2022
Toner, acrylic, adhesive vinyl, Indian ink, and modeling paste on board
197 x 120 cm

7.500 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2022
Toner, acrylic, adhesive vinyl, Indian ink, and modeling paste on board
120 x 197 cm

7.500 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2022
Enamel and acrylic on glass
Variable dimensions

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2022
120 x 90 cm

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2014
Collage on wood and smoked glass
20 x 20 cm each

Ángela Cuadra
Grutesco I
2021
Collage
115 x 162 cm

6.500 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2016
Collage on Dibond
21 x 25 cm

Ángela Cuadra
Contrasombra III
2015
Enamel on wood

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2020
Collage on paper and varnish on wood
29.5 x 20.5 cm

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2021
Acrylic and Indian ink on wood and collage on paper
34 x 43.5 cm

1.500 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Anodos / Katodos I
2018
Enamel and acrylic on glass
55 x 41 cm

Ángela Cuadra
Anodos / Katodos II
2018
Enamel and acrylic on glass
50 x 41.5 cm

2.500 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2020
Enamel and acrylic on glass
42 x 31 cm

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2020
Enamel and acrylic on glass
42 x 30 cm

Ángela Cuadra. Hurón. Alimentación 30, Madrid. 2015

Ángela Cuadra. Casa, studio, calle, barrio. CentroCentro, Madrid. 2016

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Angela Cuadra
Contrasombra II
2015
Enamel on cardboard
15 x 15 x 15 cm each

700 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Nunca nada parecido. Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini.

Ante el desafío de evidenciar lo invisible, las artistas Laura F. Gibellini y Ángela Cuadra ahondan sobre los mecanismos a través de los cuáles se construye lo que está oculto, desvanecido o es intangible, generando estrategias de representación para ello. En este sentido, Nunca nada parecido reúne trabajos recientes de ambas artistas que tratan de una materia que, aunque inteligible, es imperceptible.

Obras que plasman en el campo de lo visual lo que con la mirada inocente no se puede ver. Lo que sabemos que está, sentimos su presencia, pero cuyo esfuerzo de la representación visual propone un amplio desafío cognitivo. Y esto, sin dudas, ocupa un lugar fundamental hasta en las más ínfimas dinámicas cotidianas de los tiempos que corren. Hay algo que ahí está, etéreo, oculto, impalpable, pero sabemos que está.

El proyecto de Laura F. Gibellini para la exposición trata de hacer visible la existencia de un aire que hasta hace poco dábamos por supuesto y que sin embargo se ha convertido hoy en un elemento que hemos de constatar a cada paso. Las obras de la artista recurren a las condiciones meteorológicas o atmosféricas de determinados lugares para indagar en aquellos elementos que se encuentran en los límites de lo visible y, por tanto, en los límites de aquello que se puede pensar.

A partir del dibujo expandido, la artista supera los dogmas bidimensionales del dibujo tradicional hacia la realización de proyectos espaciales inmersivos. La visibilización del aire se formaliza en sus trabajos desde el dibujo de la luz, la percepción sobre la influencia de fenómenos astronómicos, o bien, desde el ejercicio poético y metafórico que vincula la respiración dificultada por la elevada altitud del Jungfrau en los Alpes con el cristal soplado por la expiración e inspiración del maestro de horno de la Real Fábrica de Cristales de La Granja con quien ha colaborado para este proyecto.

Ángela Cuadra, por su parte, investiga imágenes que versan sobre técnicas de ocultamiento usadas a lo largo de la historia reciente, en un amplio estudio fenomenológico de la invisibilidad. Al examinar las tensiones entre lo natural y lo artificial, lo público y lo privado, el todo y las partes, lo esencial y lo superfluo, la artista utiliza un material con cargas históricas y semánticas preexistentes para reconvertirlo y resignificarlo. Fundamentadas en el collage y abordadas desde la intuición, sus obras inducen composiciones en las que apenas se elabora el material encontrado con protagonismo a las formas por si mismas a través de su yuxtaposición a otros materiales.

El foco especial en el diálogo entre fragmentos, en la emoción que surge al encontrar acordes de color, forma o textura, asemejan la percepción de su trabajo a la de una composición musical. Hacer lenguaje sin literatura, hacer música sin melodía, hacer pintura sin pintura. Hacer construyendo desde la base de lo que está dado, de lo que se encuentra en los márgenes.

Nunca nada parecido es la segunda edición de Interludios, un conjunto de exposiciones de corta duración en NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ, cuya propuesta es generar un espacio de visibilidad para proyectos pensados por los artistas, representados o no por la galería, y que hasta entonces no se han podido realizar.

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Ángela Cuadra
Outdoor living
2014
Collage on paper
42,5 x 30 cm each [tryptych]

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Angela Cuadra
Contrasombra I
2015
Enamel on cardboard
25 x 12.5 x 12.5 cm

Ángela Cuadra
Sin título
2016
Acrylic on wood
30,5 x 25,5 cm | 24 x 20 cm [diptych]

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Angela Cuadra
Untitled
2021
Jacquard fabric
85 x 107 cm

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Angela Cuadra
Tsuru Tsuru
2020
Tóner, acrílico, vinilo adhesivo, tinta china y pasta de modelar sobre tabla
197 x 120 cm

7.500 € (IVA incluido)

Ángela Cuadra
Untitled
2020
Indian ink, acrylic, collage, and synthetic varnish on wood
29,5 x 20,5 cm each [diptych]

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Angela Cuadra
Untitled
2019
Collage, acrylic, and adhesive vinyl on paper
84 x 64 cm

2.400 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Angela Cuadra

Untitled
2020
Collage and Indian ink on paper
50 x 39 cm

Angela Cuadra
Untitled
2021
Collage on paper
67 x 49 cm

1.850 € (VAT included)

Ángela Cuadra y Laura F. Gibellini. Interludio 2: Nunca nada parecido. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid. 2021

Ángela Cuadra. Alineaciones. 2020. Collage sobre papel.
Exhibition El Arca. Lecturas contemporáneas sobre el Archivo de la Villa.
Curated by Pía Ojea
CC Conde Duque, Madrid. 2020-2021

The exhibition El Arca. Contemporary Readings of the Archivo de Villa aims to serve as a bridge between the past of Madrid’s history, preserved in the valuable collections of the Archivo de Villa, and the contemporary experience of living in, moving through, and understanding the city of Madrid.

This project is an invitation to twelve contemporary Spanish artists and/or Madrid-based artists to work with the bibliographic collections of the Archivo de Villa. The goal of this research is to culminate in an exhibition at Conde Duque, where a dialogue is created between the bibliographic documents selected by the artists and the works they have specifically produced for the occasion. These works will be exhibited alongside the original documents that served as their inspiration.

About the work:

The city we inhabit as our portrait. Sidewalks, doorways, corners, alignments— the city leaves its mark on us, and we leave ours on it.

Alineaciones (Alignments) is an intimate portrait from a public perspective. Based on digitized documents of street alignments in the Palacio district, housed in the Archivo de Villa, Ángela Cuadra creates a self-portrait of her life within the streets of Madrid, her city.

The Archivo de Villa and the artist’s personal archive merge, just as the public and the private intertwine in the city’s streets. Small stories, fragments of encapsulated paper, experiences of moving through a city, of a life.

Ángela Cuadra. Canicas. Exposición ‘Un metro y medio’. CA2M, Madrid.

Curators: Manuel Segade and Tania Pardo Pérez

In these strange times of complete uncertainty, we inhabit a world where the future will no longer be as we once imagined it. If contemporary art museums are dedicated to working on the future of art and anticipating the artistic forms to come, we understand that it is our duty to begin constructing new ways of understanding our work, promoting new relationships of solidarity, and inventing different forms of institutional care.

CA2M has launched the project #Unmetroymedio, in which artists residing in the Madrid region will explain their work from their confinement. Using whatever household resources they have at their disposal, they will communicate their ideas through texts and images or simply share how they are feeling and the possible futures they face. The project’s title refers to the social distance that must be maintained between people during quarantine—a rule that, whether through windows, balconies, or screens, has led to the invention of new forms of emotional closeness.

All this material, released every three days on our social media, will gradually form a simple, minimal, and reflective archive. At the same time, it will serve as a record of the need to communicate through screens, of domestic spaces transformed into makeshift workspaces, of creative production in times of crisis, of digital networks of affection, and of collective ways of confronting fear. Each contribution will expand the museum’s documentary collection to capture the historical, political, and social moment we are living in.

#Unmetroymedio is an inherently open project that will evolve alongside the unfolding uncertainty of these days and the longed-for moment of reconstruction.

Más info: https://edicion.ca2m.org/exposiciones/unmetroymedio/angela-cuadra

Ángela Cuadra. Querer parecer noche.
CA2M
Curators: Beatriz Alonso and Carlos Fernández Pello
2018

Ángela Cuadra. Shadows conceal and reveal. Exposición individual en Espacio Cruce, Madrid. Febrero de 2015

In this exhibition, Ángela Cuadra explores the relationship between conceptual trends in art history and certain critical aspects developed in her artistic practice, which focus their aesthetic attention on the structural importance of social forces in contemporary society.

The status and treatment of the image have become key aspects in provoking states of confusion and exclusion within aesthetics and politics. The artist is aware that the function of art has been reduced by ruthless training—within a framework of speculative visual exercises—aiming to banish its sense of belonging to society and its role as a mediator in public discourse, either through total absorption or unlimited transparency. This exhibition, therefore, opens up a reflection on how the spectacle of war and the specter of fear have been camouflaged in nearly all aspects of daily life and how they are wielded to justify new forms of authoritarian control, disguised as “expert” knowledge, at the expense of public debate and participation.

While History, with a capital «H,» appears as a chronological succession of events, manifesting through multiple references to precise dates and occurrences, the web of concealed realities is fragmented, opaque, full of deceptive ellipses and suspensions of all change, of returns and repetitions. Any critical visual approach to these amalgamations generates multiple ways of assessing our responsibility in the face of the vertigo of the inevitable. Perhaps there are still remnants of a lucid contemplation that persist in the art system, barely surviving the ongoing radical secularization of modernity. These remnants allow for a certain distance from the fusion and evolution of the circulation of images and hegemonic powers.

It is necessary to examine those old forms of camouflage to determine whether they can be repurposed to find new ways to integrate and transcend failed modernity. A new cycle of fractures and experiences could begin, rescuing humanity—not just from a world saturated with automated-image-obfuscation but, above all, from superficiality. Modernity has always secretly pointed—through its ideological masks and Dalinian psychological camouflage—toward a complete externalization of self-care, avoiding the subject’s engagement with an aesthetics of existence and thus preventing imagination from approaching the space of the other. The collapse of the depths of being beneath the immovable tombstone of «objective knowledge,» along with the global expansion of the market, has led worldviews toward an aggressive and warlike logic, camouflaged by the emerging society of spectacle and artistic avant-gardes.

Human beings have become technological entities par excellence, with every technical advancement being applied primarily to themselves and driven by insatiable self-interest. This translates into the limitless exploitation of finite resources—where the neoliberal logic of wealth acquisition steamrolls over sustainability concerns—trapping humanity in an endless labyrinth with the idea of progress as its mantra. The modern state, dictated by a general history of systemic intensifications, may only be able to conceal and/or camouflage these «excesses» of unlimited progress with natural landscapes painted over nuclear plants, as Ángela Cuadra aptly alludes to in one of her works.

Battleships designed in cubist forms now sail through all the oceans of this great transformation, where citizens have become consumer-slaves hungry for disposable symbols. Camouflage has now returned to the world of art to reveal how the relations of production and consumption are pushing the planet toward a grave ecological crisis with insurmountable limits. The exhibition explores various aspects of recent history in which people are reduced to mere cogs in an enlightened, controlling, and voracious machine, where aesthetic experience has been replaced by a forgotten form of taxidermy.

Ángela Cuadra calls for a reconsideration of creativity’s role in reinterpreting specific historical visions, reclaiming an imaginary constitution through aesthetic practices that promote a critical revision of inherited simulacra. She proposes a resistance to the unfortunate devaluation of thought, as she considers artistic creation to be a radical act of commitment to imagination.

Alexis Callado Estefanía

Ángela Cuadra. The Stuff That Surrounds us. Galería Josedelafuente. 2016

What is truly contemporary is untimely. Those silent seekers who break the supposedly ordered chronology imposed incessantly by institutions manage to be out of time. Reorganizing the fragments we have at hand, interrogating them, and widening the cracks of time allows us to challenge the stagnant reading of what surrounds us. In The Stuff That Surrounds Us, Ángela Cuadra and Eva Fàbregas present a floating exhibition, like a ship launched into adventure, shedding what is stagnant to delve into an aporia structured around scattered works, as if they were remnants of a controlled explosion.

«Do not forget that you are the core of a rupture. God has separated from himself to let us speak, so that we may feel estranged and question ourselves. And he has done so not by speaking, but by remaining silent, letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs, allowing the Tablets to break,» wrote Jacques Derrida in Writing and Difference, likening the fragmentation of the text to the rupture of an original order. From these broken pieces, «poetry springs forth, and the right to speech takes root. The adventure of the text begins again, like weeds, outside the Law.»

The small panels installed by Ángela Cuadra present bands of black and yellow juxtaposed with an accumulation of tiny, erratic drops in vibrant colors. Controlled, almost restrained gestures ornament the surface of these paintings, like a wall «riddled with erratic stains [that] produces a deflagration.» Erratic stains which, in their praise of anachronism, Didi-Huberman identified in the frescoes that Fra Angelico painted in the Convent of San Marco in Florence in the 15th century. When brought into dialogue with Pollock’s dripping, they unexpectedly illuminate other possible narratives and perceptions. The fruitful anachronism emerges precisely in the experience of temporal disjunction.

Once the apparent confusion of the first glance is overcome, when we observe the random heterogeneity that surrounds us, the experience of distancing may arise— as if looking through a kaleidoscope of impure times, capable of revealing, through their misalignment, the hidden potential of signs and their histories. “One who truly belongs to their time, who is truly contemporary, is someone who does not completely coincide with it nor conforms to its demands. It is precisely for this reason that, through this detour and anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their time,” writes Giorgio Agamben when reflecting on what it means to be contemporary.

(…)

In Ángela Cuadra’s new canvases, a green hue—one that has little to do with nature and instead decisively evokes the world of design—asserts itself at the center of the composition. However, it merely waits to abdicate in favor of the decorative elements already surrounding it, quietly belligerent, closing in to dethrone it. The artist organizes her paintings from the edges; rather than rushing into a predetermined compositional scheme, she joyfully surrenders to one part of the canvas, only to later step back and fully immerse herself in another fragment.

Details emerge that could belong to remnants of walls or floors, fragments of a grotesque in ruins, half-hidden beneath vegetation. These remnants, alongside the artificial green, form a kind of swing for the viewer, a montage of singularities that moves back and forth— we are in the middle of a deflagration!

(…)

The two artists of The Stuff That Surrounds Us organize their works from the corners, venturing onto formal and conceptual scaffolding that recalls the grotesque—like wild weeds that, through ornamentation, end up dominating the space. Through strategies of temporal suspension, they encircle and captivate the viewer who approaches the exhibition. From the periphery to the center, from void to surface, the paintings, sculptures, and photographs of this project advance like a snail carrying its heterogeneous fragments on its back. Nestled within its shell is the full force of a collision of times—times that, because they are untimely, always “just before” or “shortly after,” remain unpredictable. Like whispered words emerging from intimacy, they release a subjectivity that, through successive displacements, offers the viewer a new experience.

Text for the exhibition ‘The Stuff That Surrounds Us’
Ángela Cuadra and Eva Fábregas
Curator: Francesco Giaveri
Galería José de la Fuente, Santander