Cruce de fronteras

Artists from Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, Israel and Poland cross their borders for a meeting in Madrid, seeking to share common human concerns from different angles, realities and languages. As artists, boundaries vanish in a dialogue and a meeting between peers who recognize each other in creation. Can we propose an understanding?, a better world through art?, a world where differences are a reason for encounter? We believe in art as a field of exploration to these questions.

Today’s art world demands answers in multiple settings, both local and international. Cultural globalization demands that we be more nomadic, expanding borders to give greater visibility to works of art, in order to reach collectors, curators and other agents of the cultural map. In this context +GALLERyLABS, project started a summer of 2016 by Graciela Sapia (Good)
Aires) and Gabriel DaSilva (New Haven), contributes significantly by building bridges and developing the necessary collaboration between artists, gallery owners, curators and members of cultural organizations. The Crossing of Frontiers exhibition is a group exhibition at Galería Nueva Las Letras, and is the first pop up of +GALLERyLABS outside the Americas, attracted by a space whose leitmotif is the very spirit of +GALLERyLABS.

The artists participating in the show are Liliana Antonow, Carolina Carubin, Norberto Estrin, Lidia González, the duo Brian Keith Stephen and Pola Esther, Linda Lindroth, Liliana Livneh, Alejandra Nowiczewski, Valeria Real and Romina Rudy.

LINDA LINDROTH. American artist, lives and works in New Haven, USA.
Series: Trickster in Flatland
Lindroth’s large-scale high-resolution digital photographs examine the shape of different abandoned boxes in various states of deterioration and disintegration. Stripped of their identity, they speak to us about the ephemeral in various states of decadence, stripped of their identity, flattening them and folding their sides. The enlargement of the image seeks to decontextualize these objects from everyday life, this large scale reveals all the imperfections and the worn color of their surface. The resulting images reveal references to the paintings of Ed Ruscha or Malevich.

CAROLINA CARUBIN. Argentinean artist, lives and works in Buenos Aires
Series: Synergies
The works consist of found fragments that were once part of a whole and are linked by threads, strings and ties that evoke new links between these elements, thus reconfiguring a new reality. Like a kind of creature of Dr. Frankenstein, the mystery of the transformed matter, the softness of the skin in its texture and what lies beneath it are the way in which this series of works by the Argentinean artist appears, reconfigured, before the eyes of the spectator.

FALOBLU. BRIAN_KEITH_STEPHEN and POLA ESTHER. American and Polish, they live and work between New York and Old Lyme (Connecticut, USA).

Series Electric Bunnies
It is a series of lithographic monotypes printed on Korean and Japanese handmade papers. The pieces contain a selection of photographs from the Moto Erotica magazine, created by the artists during the summer months. Electric Bunnies is a sexy pictorial session that expresses the love story with mopeds. It’s a scoundrel version of “magazine for men.” It’s a punk erotic joke on a motorcycle. It’s a hot, naughty summer diary. It’s a radical collectible, a vintage book of contemporary art.
Faloblu is a collective founded by Pola Esther and Brian Keith Stephens.
BRIAN KEITH STEPHENS is an American painter. Stephens began art studies in his native Connecticut, continued in Paris and New York, before returning to the rural studio at Old Lyme.
POLA ESTHER is a Polish-born photographer and mixed media artist living in Brooklyn, NY and Old Lyme, CT.

NORBERTO ESTRIN. Argentinean artist, lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Norberto Estrin takes the main structural element of the tree – the trunk – showing its pure nature. In the first stage he intervenes with plates, rods and polished iron wires, accentuating the vigor of his work, or with colour giving another look at his previous stage, but maintaining the discourse of opposites.

LILIANA ANTONOW. Argentinean artist, lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Series Metamorphosis of the city
In this work Antonow tackles a singular path by deconstructing traditional photography perceived as a flat representation of reality to construct a new three-dimensional space highlighting the fragmented parts, re-writing them as superimposed planes. In this way, the artist creates an atmosphere that is fragmented from different points of view and invites the action of recomposing through a thorough analysis of the original lines and volumes in a new order.

LIDIA GONZALEZ. Argentinean artist, lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As the artist herself states: “The sewing machine and my own hand are tools with which I draw stitches, threads and knots, women who manifest themselves in their journey, women who become lines that reverberate energy and leave their mark. These are your demands, but also mine. Labyrinths of emotions, stories and memory of ancestral calls.”
Based on photos of people she spontaneously captures in street scenes and then transfers to paper, the artist draws and sews her characters, using mechanical lines of threads. The dense volume of the photograph becomes the linear, empty figure floating on the paper. Sometimes the photographic rest slips in and appears as a ghostly image of what the real person was.

ALEJANDRA NOWICZEWSKI. Argentinean artist, lives and works in Madrid.
Series: METAPORS OF SPACE Light affects surfaces, volumes, planes and everything that encompasses its spectrum. The concept of light is inextricably linked to that of shadow in an extreme and contrasting way. The importance of both elements lies in the fact that they construct space and give it movement.
At the same time, the physical qualities and emotional force of light and shadow profoundly modify our experience and generate emotions that remain in our memory and create metaphors. These trigger a series of meanings, images and associations, with a direct approach to the unconscious.
The aim of this work is to see, name and capture the metaphors that generate light and shadow in space.

VALERIA REAL. Argentinean artist, lives and works in Madrid.
Photography
Series Understanding the Matter. This series was developed during a collaboration with the Department of Oceanographic Sciences at the University of Miami, Florida, in 2019. Water constantly motivates him to work with scientific institutions for the research of his photographic projects. Laboratories, materials and scientific instruments were the trigger for an artistic work that seeks to expand the visual and emotional possibilities of images, where the cracks of science allow imagination and wonder to unfold.

ROMINA RUDY. Argentinean artist, lives and works in Cordoba, Argentina.

The Rita Cordelia series has been developed by the artist since December 2020. These women’s heads show us the many facets that we are acquiring throughout our lives; the inherited and the adopted. Masks that make up our identity. This series of sculptures is a tribute to women from cultures where the colour of ritual garments, body art, ornaments and scars are part of the codes of social belonging. These masks that hide the face of the wearer are a cultural element that has complemented the traditions of different communities around the world, giving rise to a new being.