Duo 3/5: Natalia Escudero & Maria Mrntrd

Galería Nueva presents the Dúo project, a set of five exhibitions organized by Atelier Solar and sponsored by the Madrid City Council through grants for contemporary creation and national and international mobility 2019. In this third exhibition we can see the work of Natalia Escudero and María Mrtnrd.

Natalia and María have been working for two months in the Atelier Solar studios, and the fruit of their collaboration is this exhibition that we present at Galería Nueva. Using a body of individual works and collaborative pieces in space, the artists investigate the plastic languages ​​of textiles, audiovisuals, sculpture or installations. In this way they create an immersive and atmospheric space based on works that deal with the passage of time and tactile and visual poetry.

The text that you can read below and that introduces this exhibition has been prepared by the artists themselves throughout the work process at Atelier Solar.

The documentation of life on Earth, very scarce for the Precambrian period, is unexpectedly abundant from about five hundred and twenty million years ago. Indeed, in the Cambrian and Ordovician, living organisms begin to secrete calcareous shells that will be preserved as fossils in geological strata.

Shells and time Italo Calvino

In his cosmicomics, Italo Calvino introduces us to Qfwfq, the first mollusk to build a spiral shell, and he does so out of his desire to mate with a female mollusk. As in many of his narratives, in “The Spiral” Calvino makes desire the driving force of the universe. In the same way, desire becomes the driving force behind the work of Mary, a desire that arises from every pore of her skin and manifests itself, as it cannot be otherwise, through the sense of touch.

“The spiral of each fingerprint is unique. Its internal structure is common and different from all of them, such as that of the shells; beyond those beautiful shapes that are repeated, streaks of bright colors make them special to our eyes. They are also inimitable the ceramic balls that Maria shapes, an almost performative making that extends over time and that becomes her own expression, just as the spiral is of the mollusk, a shape that shapes our notion of time. Round and round of mud between his fingers. Facing each other, he plunges his index finger and thumb into the wet clay. His fingers exert a slight pressure, one against the other, leaving that spiral imprint that seems to direct the movements; his skin accompanies the material , while it accompanies her skin, and it pinches it until leaving a trace. Maria presents her work and in doing so, the subject, who is her skin, is absent. She is absent and her absence is necessary to be a trace. Do not believe obj complete ethos, but objects that speak of doing and feeling, of repeating, picking up, dropping, picking up, repeating, feeling … Mary, from desire, separates and shapes matter in the form of drops, specks, pixels , fragments that one day the waves of the sea will carry away, like a blanket that will collect the fossils of now. “

Natalia

Almost like a cyclical movement, Natalia orders the matter hit by the earthquake of the earth; land that we step on, touch and feel collapsing under our feet. As if it were about tucking, rocking and repairing it. His work speaks of feeling memory, perhaps as a wound from inevitable gestures that occur throughout time and space. Facts that surround us, and actions inherent to a traditional culture, based on caring for and taking advantage of “what has been broken”. Like a shaman, she caresses those wounds, welcomes them and assumes them as part of an inevitable story. Earthquakes and their horrors tell us about strong places, immersed in the culture of clothing and the care of a memory that represents them.

The seismic movements that he studies, analyzes and maps, serve as a metaphor for the idea of ​​protecting what is legitimate for us. With his pieces, he creates a round metaphor about the desire to reuse precious objects, and not discard them for the simple fact of being injured. From the origin of the clay, it kneads the earth, encourages us to step on it, to leave an unmistakable trace of the passage of time. From the earth to the body, to the hands. Catastrophic tremor that turns into visual poetry, into maritime waves that speak of a distant land that is so well known to us today.

Natalia Escudero

The time dimension of the fragment defines her work: she combines everyday objects with graphs of earth movements as a resource to maintain memory; play with space without forgetting time; it orders and starts up facilities that it conceives as nuclear groups; illuminates and projects images and sounds on organic surfaces … all in order to create an atmosphere, an intimate moment and at the same time open to the public.

Her work has received recognition in the national artistic panorama through the National Institute of Youth (INJUVE), the Joan Miró and Pilar Juncosa Foundation, the Santander Foundation, the Joaquina Zamora, the María José Jove Foundation, the Ankaria Foundation or the Center Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) among others, and internationally by Sotheby’s, the Cdw Foundation in Kassel, Ongoing and Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo, where she was invited as an artist in residence in 2019.

Co-founder of the Membrane collective (membrane.network), Natalia Escudero has also completed her artistic activity with other professional developments: she has been Liaison Officer in the education department of documenta 14 and Stage Manager in the organization of the artist’s performance “Whispering Campaing” American William Pope L.

Natalia Escudero López (Zaragoza, 1991) has a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and in Art in Context from the Kunsthochschule in Kassel, Germany.

Maria Mrntrd

Her work arises from the need to create according to the poetics of the materials. The main characteristic of his pieces is the multiplicity, and she develops projects whose accent is on the exhibition assembly, in order to understand and make the most of the space through specific site installations. Another of her intentions is to create pieces that allude to visual poetry. Using the symbolism of the material, she tries to emphasize the importance of sensations, in order to transform them into three-dimensional poetry that, a priori, may seem useless and decontextualized objects. Currently, her thesis research leads her to experiment with the idea of ​​touch as the main enhancer of creation and the skin as a latent organ where everything begins and all art has a place.

After having held several group exhibitions in galleries such as A del Arte in Zaragoza, Fran Reus in Mallorca or Espacio Vértice in Madrid, she has culminated in recent years with several individual exhibitions at the Alcorcón Museum of Glass Art at the Art Center. Ceramic of Triana or in the Antoni Pinyol Gallery in Reus. Last year she participated in Hybrid Art Fair with one of her works framed in the Displaced program, as well as in JustMad X with the No-No Gallery in Lisbon.

Among her latest scholarships received, she has Acciona 2018, which has led her to take the Master of Art and Artistic Professions at the SUR School. She received the Honorable Mention at the Hybrid III Alternative Spaces Festival with her work Mudar la arena, and her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, at the Center for Cultural Initiatives of the University of Seville, the Injuve Institute in Madrid, the La Carolina Cultural Center in Jaén or the Torre Bella Cultural Center in Salou.

Galería Nueva

Galería Nueva is an exhibition space in Madrid that houses projects from national or international galleries and public or private institutions that wish to promote the work of artists not represented by Madrid galleries. In recent months we have received projects from Peru (Fixed Projects Lima), United Kingdom (Division of Labor), Mexico (Galería Galería), Paris (Nicolas Dewavrin) and Barcelona (Pepe Baena) on Doctor Fourquet 10 street in Madrid.

 

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DUO 3/5

From March 15th to Aphril 16th ,2021

Natalia Escudero & Maria Mrntrd

Curated by Adrián St Clair