Ângela Ferreira, was born in Maputo, Mozambique, grew up in South Africa and earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town.

Ferreira’s work is concerned with the continuing impact of colonialism and postcolonialism in contemporary society, an investigation that she carries out in depth with the materialization of ideas in a concise and resonant formalization.

She represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 with a continuation of her research on the mechanisms through which European modernism has tried to adapt, failing on numerous occasions, to the realities of the African continent, with a project that was conceived stemming from the story of the “Maison Tropicale” by Jean Prouvé.

The architecture also serves as a starting point to delve into her long investigation of the erasure of colonial memory and the rejection of repair. On the other hand, her sculptural, sound and video tributes make constant reference to the economic, political and cultural history of the African continent, while recovering the work and the image of unexpected figures such as Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben Jor, Jorge dos Santos, Diego Rivera or Miriam Makeba.

Heir of Ana Mendieta and a whole generation of feminist artists form the early 70’s, 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.

The works by Daniela Libertad in drawing, photography and video, explore the several relations among geometric forms, objects and her own body, the perceptions on what is intangible, mystical and their connections with everyday life.

The artist investigates also on how sculptural dynamics are constructed and deposited into objects, in an effort to understand the relations of weight, tension and balance among materials, shapes and objects.

Her body of work pushes into tension the perceptions of what is both intangible and habitual. By using different media, the artist allows her work to confront immaterial elements and geometrical forms with common objects and her own body, exploring both the mystical and ethereal features of these components, and concrete aspects such as weight, density and touch. In these tension exercises, the artist unsettles the mixture between apparently opposite fields, between physical and mental or abstract and figurative, towards a stage of precarious balance between parts that, ultimately, inform us on a fragile and banal condition of our apprehension of day-to-day poetry. 

Alcaraz's discourse stems from the classical tradition of painting and sculpture, arriving to a reflection on volume, language and time through the use of materials, such as water, glass, mirrors, reflections, or books that include this idea.

In his artistic language the visual transgression predominates, a playful dynamic among many different gazes and the combination of transparencies and holes that allow a glimpse of hidden, magical spaces. Thus Jordi Alcaraz establishes, through his works, an unprecedented, surprising and metaphorical relationship with the world.

Sculptures, paintings and drawings, always through his peculiar treatment of materials, and his poetic word games and unexpected titles. Sets of pigment bags that sink into glass surfaces, poetically showing the beginning of the painting, wooden sculptures that pierce the acrylic urn in which they are in, passing from the darkness of the night to the light of day, colors that flee from their cans through imaginary holes, impossible portraits.

Due to his obsession with the craft of art, in his works he delves into the almost obsessive exploration of the artist's work: drawing, sculpting, painting ..., focusing rather in the exercise of doing, than in the works as the completion of an action. As a result, absence seems to be more relevant than evidence in the works. The absence of almost everything, and the utmost importance to the disappearance of the work, with the permanence of the action. What matters is the sensation of drawing, what is there at the precise moment before doing it, the impression at the end, but not the work itself, not the resulting drawing. There is no image or reference to any idea, the artist draws but there is no drawing left. We can see the space that has been left, the trace of the material used, but the absence of anything else is almost absolute.

Jordi Alcaraz breaks the material in different ways, everything is less evocative and more poignant. Layers of materials are superimposed as protective shields, and they build diverse and more complex layers of meaning.

His works can be found in collections such as Biedermann Museum, Donaueschingen (Germany), Colección Fontanal Cisneros, Miami; Williams Collection, Massachusetts; Olor Visual, Barcelona; or Fundación Banco Sabadell.

TEXTS Y CATALOGUES:

Exercise in Disappearance, The London List, 2021

José Luis Landet’s work involves a wide range of operating and assimilating cultural processes crossed by social, political and ideological actions, through which he explores cultural remnants.
The restoration and presentation of other artists works, mostly amateur painters,represents an ideal starting point for Landet’s objectives: to recover, document and innovate.
Landet believes classification is the most accurate way to know every tiny detail of an unfamiliar painting. The Argentinian artist deconstructs images, and in the process, reveals new narratives. Landet deconstruct images and in the process review new narratives.

INTERVIEWS AND VIDEOS:

FRAGMENTOS SOBRE UN ARCHIVO DESCONOCIDO DE CARLOS GOMEZ 1945-2014

MIÉRCOLES POSTPICTÓRICO DE CULTURA UDG CON OLGA MARGARITA DÁVILA (cap. I)

MIÉRCOLES POSTPICTÓRICO DE CULTURA UDG CON OLGA MARGARITA DÁVILA (cap. II)

TEXTS AND CATALOGUES:

Carlos Gómez. Presenta José Luis Landet, 2014 (ES EN)

EL FIN DE GÓMEZ ES ETERNO, 2019 (ES)

The Affirmation of Utopia, 2017 (EN)

ERRATAS (1983) de Carlos Gómez a Zé Braulio. Presenta José Luis Landet (PT ES)

Dibujo Actual en México, UNAM, 2020 (ES)

The work of Mauro Giaconi explores the possibilities of drawing as an expanded field, through which the artist reaches over other disciplines, such as sculpture and installation, in a way to investigate the architecture, the precariousness and the body as territories in conflict.

In this sense, the artist subverts both the role of paper as a medium, as well as the idea of drawing as the basal expression of general artistic practice. This leads towards the occupation of space, the performative gesture that emphases the corporal experience, and the intervention of objects and universal references belonging to the contemporary metanarrative.

Within the conceptual field, his works usually present contents and experiences that either clash or dissolve contrasts, such as birth and death, construction and demolition, freedom and imprisonment, in a thought-provoking gesture that revisits and questions the dichotomous signification of ideas.

INTERVIEWS AND TALKS:

Artspace: Mauro Giaconi - Why I Draw (EN)

Revista Terremoto: "Temporada de Plomo" (ES)

BOOKS, TEXTS AND CATALOGUES:

Temporada de Plomo, 2020 (ES/EN)

Vitamin D3: Today's Best in Contemporary Drawing, Phaidon Editors, 2021 (EN)

Pipo Hernandez Rivero’s work poses questions about 'universally accepted cultural truths'. Built with images and ideas very much anchored in the memories of modern culture, his works move in the territory of suspicion and opacity.

Pointing at the complexity of the possibilities of painting in the 21^st century, his works offer a reconsideration of the pictorial from both formal and conceptual structures, ideas of failure and references to the cultural avant-gardes are always underlying the works.

Mixing painting with cheap and not lasting materials and involving text in largely unknown languages, and therefore received as elements of anxiety, the pieces confront the spectator with an unresolved dialogue forcing the viewer to rethink identity and value.

This lack of understanding creates a certain anxiety in the spectator, as well as a gap of meaning that obliges us to look at the work in a deeper way.

Tomas Vu (Saigon), professor at Columbia University since 1996, and founder and artistic director of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. He has overseen collaboration and publication of projects with artists such as Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, William Kentridge, Jasper Johns, Kara Walker as well as his own work exhibiting in galleries of Paris, Bogota, New York, Beijing…His most important series include the Opium Dreams where Vu shows us a modern day vision of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” 2006 – 2012 Flatland, a serie of 103 pieces rooted in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

Rirkrit Tiravanija (1961,Buenos Aires) is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His practice defies media-based description combining traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. He has had shows at the MOMA, NY, in 1996, the LACMA in Los Angeles in 1999, the Musee d’art Moderne de La Ville de Paris (2005), the Reina Sofia in Spain in 1994, or the Guggenheim in NYC.
He has also participated at the Sao Paolo Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Venice biennale in several ocassions. He is a teacher at Columbia Univeristy and a founder and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, historians and currators. He is president of the educational and ecological project The Land Foundation.