2057
MICHEL FRANÇOIS
MARCIUS GALAN
HELEN MIRRA
ANTONIO VEGA MACOTELA
In 1977 Nieves Fernández opened Yerba in Murcia. With a clear critical and political character, the Gallery has been working during all these years, representing both national and international artists, being part of the contemporary art debate.
Confronting the challenge of a second generation gallery, we don’t want to commemorate what we have been, but instead celebrate the opening of a gallery that will turn 40 years more and will do so working and enjoying with the most fascinating contemporary artists. Those we felt for, and who, without any doubt, will write a chapter of the upcoming art history.
It is not about exploring a theme, but a utopia. However, all the artists presented in 2057 have implicit in their interventions the idea of sketch, and that the most important is not the final result but the process and its possible consequences, related with fate, essay and mistakes.
From the conceptual tradition, the exhibited works materialize or dematerialize in front of our eyes, questioning the limits, and the boundaries of the space, and, by extension, the sociopolitical system we inhabit. They are works that move, through an extreme graphic and formal simplicity, at the borders of the usual systems of representation.
Based in action, contact changes and the duality between control and the ungovernable, the conscious process of taking decisions every day, the space, and chance. After all the course over time.
Art is a motor of change and if we want to rethink the future, we have to stimulate imagination and, for this, nothing better than please ourselves inviting you to a trip, start ourselves a trip. For no other reason, but the pleasure of our ideal show.
Michel François, 1956 Belgium, has represented Belgium at the Venice biennial, and has exhibited in museums and institutions like the MACBA in Barcelona, SMAK of Ghent, the Centre Pompidou at Paris, Casa Wabi in Mexico, or the Miro Foundation in Barcelona. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions such as Documenta IX (1992), the São Paolo Biennial XXII (1994), Maison Rouge in Paris, Foundation Boghossian, Kunstmuseum of Bonn and Sonsbeek. Together with Ann Veronica Janssens he contributed to The Song (2009) by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Other collaborations with De Keersmaeker include En Atendant (2010) and Partita 2 (2013).
Marcius Galan, 1972 EEUU, has participated in group exhibitions at institutions and biennales including: the 29th and 30th editions of the São Paulo Biennale, 8th Mercosul Biennale and Biennale of the Americas (MCA, Denver, USA), Inhotim, Palais de Tokio, Paris, Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia, the Musee d’Art Contemporaine de Lyon, or the Guggenheim d of Bilbao.
Helen Mirra, 1970 EEUU, has participated at the biennials of Sao Paolo and Venice, and realized solo institutional exhibitions including Culturgest, Lisboa, KW, Berlin, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, Kunstverein in Munich, the renaissance society in NYC, o the MIT of Massachussets. She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions as the Hammer Museum in LA, the Houston Museum, the New Museum in NYC, the Kunstverein, Hambourg, CA2M and Casa Encendida in Madrid…
Antonio Vega Macotela, 1980 México, has participated in documenta 14, Manifesta 9 and the biennials of Istanbul, New Orleans, and Sao Paolo. Institutions as the Paláis du Tokio, París, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and the Museo Carrillo Gil, México, CIFO, Miami, o Rijksakademie in Ámsterdam has exhibited his work.
Unexpected Moves
Alexej Meschtschanow examines the physical and aesthetic qualities of established social conventions through sculpture and installation. Studying our immediate social environments with an analytic and compassionate eye, he assembles found objects, derelict furniture and archival photography.
His work focuses on the imaginative potential and psychological depths involved in the construction of identities, compulsion toward self-realization and the socially driven urge for optimization.
With a work characterized by the gesture of holding, retaining, and attaching, from 2017 symbols of movement have incorporated to his language. In a time when it seems we have accomplished the dream of absolute mobility, when the movement of humans, goods or even social imperatives is no longer a great challenge, Unexpected Moves offers a tragicomic and abstract vision about the different realities that move humanity.
Danica Phelps. The Gratitude Project
Danica Phelps new project begins with an auction of her own works through social media to raise funds for several nonprofit organizations. The second generation of each drawing will be exhibited at Untitled San Francisco within a drawing depicting the work of each nonprofit. A growing net a drawings, a statement, and a fight. Art as motor of change.
“This project came out of the hours that I spend making my work and listening to the BBC and NPR telling the harrowing stories of refugees trying to make their way out of war and terror into some kind of safe life. I felt that I had to do something to help. My main skill is art making, so I started auctioning drawings on Facebook as a way to raise money for organizations who are working to help. This has morphed into a project to address all kinds of issues that are important to me. And now with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, I feel that there are domestic issues that I would like to make a contribution to as well. Each drawing depicts something in my (rather mundane) everyday life. The organization which is the recipient of the auction proceeds is chosen to pair with each drawing in a meaningful way. The result of each transaction is a diptych which shows the work that the organization does in drawings next to a tracing of the drawings of my everyday life that were sold as a result of the auction”.
The work of Danica Phelps gathers conceptual precedents not only by taking in account economy as a main theme of her work but also in the own practice of the data capture, the exhaustiveness, and in the record of the facts that have been a main feature of conceptual art.
Since 1996 Danica Phelps has been documenting all her income and expenses through drawings in a system that becomes increasingly layered and complex.
Fritzia Irizar. La historia del humo
At early XIX century a bloody war of independence explodes in México and took the lives of thousands of people. One hundred years later, a new war deranges the country under a different premise: Mexican revolution starts, along with so many other similar revolutions, the violent XX century and the devastation left in its path. Almost a century later, with horrifying mathematical symmetry, it begins a new war: the combat against drug cartels and organized crime, a war that left the dismal amount of over hundred thousand mortal victims along the nation.
On April 26, 1937, a Blitz was performed (later it will be considered as a clear example of a war crime) by the German and Italian armies as a way of support to the uprising side which fought against the government of the Spanish Second Republic.Eighty years after that terrible event in Guernica, Russia attacks the Aleppo, Syria, area with aerial bombardments as a new offensive against the opponents of the regime. It seems to be that history tries to repeat itself or rather that we endeavor to repeat it.
Fritzia Irízar's work approaches war as an act of barbarism that we keep repeating century after century, as if we fail to understand the mistakes of our past in order not to commit them again, that is, we continue to make the same decisions guided by selfish, perverse and ambitious interests; the clearest and most influential of all of them: money.
This is perhaps a consideration that was not taken into account in The Wealth of Nations, a beautiful economic utopia that functions as the basis for the neoliberal capitalist system, which gives full freedom to the market, in the hope that for a reason (an invisible hand) the economic system thrives. Evidently, the current facts shout that this is not the case.
Fritzia's discourse tells us about a market that has been sustained by that decaying economic system that arises from Adam Smith's analysis of the origin and causes of prosperity, a market that has enriched a few at the expense of the life of millions and has responded to the political interests of the great world powers: the war market. Her work becomes a protest against all those hidden purposes that fuel warlike conflicts, and seeks a last claim through art, a pure art that has not yet been corrupted by mercantile or economic purposes, an exploration and analysis, through language, of the critical state in which society finds itself: such pure art is poetry.
Leonardo González
Fritzia Irizar, Culiacán, Mexico, 1977, she has exhibited in institutions like Sala Siqueiros of Ciudad de Mexico, Museo de Arte Zapopán, or Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She has participated in the biennial of Mercosur at PortoAlegre, the biennial of FEMSA and group exhibitions at CA2M, CIFO Fundacion Fontanals Cisneros, Miami, Fundación Giorgio Cini, Venezia, Museo Rufino Tamayo or Fundacion Banco Santander among others.
Rafael Grassi. En el huracán del ojo
Resbala el suelo bajo el firme pie del sabio
Lo pesado vuela y lo ligero sin embargo
Del seísmo de las cosas
Surge el tremor de la mirada
Cuando la certeza desfallece
Germina certera,
Sin escrúpulo, la duda
Absurda, luminosa, indiferente
Llanamente existiendo para nadie
Ahora o fresas
Como una mañana sin canto
Rodado
Sin verlo persigue el huracán su ojo
Cielo enterrado
En el Infierno la Gloria
Visto lo visto
Casi me alegro de mi exilio
También anidan las flores en la boca del lobo