DESAFÍO(S). Inéditad Gallery, Galería Beatriz Pereira and ArtQuake Gallery
Herbert Marcuse, a famous member of the Frankfurt School, said that literature and art were a rational cognitive force that revealed a dimension of man and nature that was repressed and rejected in reality.
DESAFÍO(S) is an exhibition project that places art at the center as a vehicle for transformation in an increasingly alienated and impassive society. To carry out this proposal, ArtQuake Gallery, Galería Beatriz Pereira and Inéditad Gallery, three galleries that work mostly online, flaunt the concept of omnichannel to jointly face their own challenge(s) and physically organize this exhibition that will see the light from September 24 to October 6 in the space of Galería Nueva at Doctor Fourquet nº 10 in Madrid.
This exhibition first of all reflects on what this rejected dimension is. The answer will be found in a compendium of works that will bring viewers closer to other realities, establishing a critical dialogue with them and constructing new points of view. Concepts such as inequality, memory – or the absence of it – or the decadence of human singularity, conceived as a corpus of pre-established norms through the passing of generations, are now questioned and even challenged through art. Like a mirror, the work acts as a reflection in the form of a message full of signs, in which artist and spectator, or sender and receiver, meet. The result of this approach is a journey into consciousness through contemplation, and the assimilation of the need for art as a means of change and critical transcendence in contemporary society. An instrument, in short, that incites us to stop, look and reflect, in a time of continuous change, transience and life in a constant maelstrom.
Artists
The artists featured in this exhibition are, on behalf of ArtQuake Gallery: Aisha Ascóniga, Aneoa and Belén Lei Lei; Galería Beatriz Pereira shows the works of Isabel Flores, María JL Hierro, Pilar del Puerto and Virginia Rivas; and Inéditad Gallery exhibits the latest works by Albert Bonet, Alex Domènech, Eduardo Urdiales, Sergio de la Flora and Stefano Mussato.
Aisha Ascóniga (Lima, 1989) returns to Madrid to present her new series El eterno femenino, which takes its title from the play by Rosario Castellanos (1975). With a critical and ironic touch, she shows the expectations and limitations imposed on women through portraits and collages that seek and question the truth.
Albert Bonet (Riba-Roja d’Ebre, Tarragona, 1996) deconstructs the concept of beauty, approaching it from a subversive perspective and questioning social conventions. To do so, he displays a revolutionary realist style that exudes rebelliousness and nonconformity.
Photographer Alex Domènech (Santpedor, Barcelona, 1986) presents his new project Queer man / Chemsex, which aims to make the reality of Chemsex visible, being this a problem that requires a multidisciplinary approach free of stigmas and moral judgements. To this end, he is exhibiting four unpublished photographic works, two of which are pictorially intervened by the artist Stefano Mussato (Turin, Italy, 1990) in the form of an ‘exquisite corpse’.
Aneoa (Hernani, 1987) presents his project Second Nature based on the premise of humanity’s original desire to subjugate nature, resulting in its devastation and our disconnection from it.
Belén Lei Lei (Hunan, 1999) begins a new section in her career with ‘Inhabiting the city’, a series of works that portray the aspects and places of the city where the artist finds some kind of aesthetic interest.
The group of works that Eduardo Urdiales (Roquetas de Mar, Almería, 1998) presents in Desafío(s) addresses, critically and through contemporary drawing, the precariousness faced by young people today, focusing on areas such as work in the hotel and catering industry and the escalation of rental prices to unsustainable levels.
Isabel Flores (Hornachos, 1989) defends and gives value to the discredited decorativism through textile arts and ceramics, proposing the challenge of going against the elitist and patriarchal current that Loos initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, just as artists of the Pattern & Decoration movement such as Joyce Kozloff or Miriam Schapiro did in the 1970s, proposing a revision of these theories of modernity.
María JL Hierro (Huelva, 1985) proposes to play visually with our mind by expressing herself through words. On this occasion, she creates a work of opposites, modelling a tic-tac-toe board whose pieces contain opposing concepts such as LOVE – HATE or KILL – SAVE. In another line, this artist also proposes to address issues such as inequality, the economy and the distribution of power throughout history.
Pilar del Puerto (Plasencia, 1997) exhibits among others her work Happiness Mirror, a unique piece that makes the spectator consider how in an increasingly ‘technologised’ society, machines through AI acquire a greater decision-making capacity over our lives and even learn abstract concepts such as ‘happiness’.
Sergio de la Flora (Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, 1990) understands art as a form of legacy with which to bear witness to an era or a particular moment for later generations. Under this premise, he proposes for this exhibition VIDAS, a series of pictorial works in a markedly realistic style with which he intends to seamlessly reflect scenes of the migratory crisis in the Mediterranean. A humanitarian crisis that claims hundreds of lives every year.
Los espacios en blanco is the latest project in which Virginia Rivas (Madrid, 1981) is immersed, in which, playing with the range of greys and whites, she generates precisely blank spaces that refer to the loss of memory in illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease.
