We join in with great ideas that we are unable to fully sustain. Many of them represent progress, change and evolution, but they are also the origin of hypocritical attitudes in our society. Vegans buy flowers is an exercise of self-criticism that highlights the contradictions we all tend to fall into. Iván Forcadell (1993) crosses the limit of everything that should not be said with this experiment that vindicates his need to end the hypocrisy and silences imposed by contemporary morality.

The exhibition is a tribute to flowers, main characters of an excessive universe of fun and carefreeness that floods the gallery’s room. The artist wants to give a voice to these beings, talk about their feelings and build a safe space for them; show that not all are the same, not all enjoy the same mental state or have the same dreams … Shall we talk about the flowers’ fetishes? In a constant humorous mood, the author imagines how the day to day of a flower must be like. He wonders: Does anyone ever thinks how the rose feels when its used indiscriminately for funerals and celebrations? What is the chamomile doing? Or what happen’s when the lavander isn’t in the mood to hide bad smells?

The key of this exhibition is the irony, present in each symbol, in the language, and even in its colors. As seen in the artist’s first piece of video art titled “Another Price in Love”, the artist’s main intention is to transport the viewer to the precise moment when a flower is being defoliated while screeching screams fill the space through a strident and agonizing sounds. Thus he reveals the pain of others and how others use it for their own benefit.

The Virgin of Flowers, the second axis of the show, embodies that tradition that is always present in Forcadell’s proposals. This virgin sculpture with a kitsch air that alludes to those pre-Christian cultures in which flowers were the central element of the offerings; meant to convert the viewer into a devotee and, with a certain sarcasm, invites them to participate in this rite that consists of offering a flower while condemning it to observe the world from impotence. The judges of the act are the vessels located in front of the virgin. Which alude to the great contradiction of the show, in which they are at the same time containers of life, inasmuch as they keep the flowers fresh, but at the same time they become funeral urns, since in the background they are spaces without escape for them.

Forcadell plays with the viewer and in a witty manner proposes an exercise in self-criticism. He represents the subtlety of contradictions and asks whether we will be able to perceive in all of those in which we incur. Vegans buy flowers is evidence of that fine line that sustains our morals.

 

To learn more about the exhibition, schedule your appointment and learn more about the Lab 36 visit the website at www.lab36.org and its social networks at www.instagram.com/lab36.bcn

“Bienvenidos a La Ricada” (Welcome to La Ricarda” is intended to be an open window from Lab 36 by Galeria Senda to the house and its surroundings. A celebration of a way to understand and embrace culture, which has always been portrayed by the welcoming spirit of La Ricarda. The bright and cheerful colors of the paintings pay a festive tribute to La Ricarda and textures of the audiovisuals show us her skin, the richness of the materials that compose her, and her natural environment.

“Bienvenidos a La Ricarda” is intended to be an immersive experience, a guided tour that transmits emotions similar to the produced when visiting the house. Painting and audiovisual come together and complement each other to offer a complete portrait of a truly special and unique place. A place that in addition to being an architectural jewel recognized throughout the world holds the story of a family, a way of perceiving life and culture.

 

The exhibition will be released at Gallery Weekend on 15 September from 17.00 to 20 hrs.

To learn more about the exhibition, schedule your appointment and learn more about the Lab 36 visit the website at www.lab36.org and its social networks at www.instagram.com/lab36.bcn

In our 28th participation at the ARCO fair in Madrid, we present a selection of the latest creations by a series of artists with whom we have worked over the last few years. Both national and international artists, who are the pillars of our identity and history as a gallery, as well as new proposals by younger or emerging artists.

This year we will once again count on the presence of Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955), an iconic figure of sculpture at an international level, who has just closed an exhibition in our gallery a few months ago, and of whom we will present a piece at ARCOmadrid 2021. Peter Halley (New York, 1953), whose exhibition “New Paintings” opened the 2020-2021 season at SENDA Gallery, will also be present with one of his latest works. Photographs by Jordi Bernadó (Lleida, 1966), whose ID series will be shown at the end of the year at MNAC in Barcelona, and Ola Kolehmainen (Helsinki, 1966) will not be missing; both artists are currently working on new projects. Painter Yago Hortal (Barcelona, 1983) will present his monographic book edited by SENDA Ensayo and a series of large-format paintings with which he inaugurates a new formal turn; some of these works have been part of Hortal’s solo show at the Vila Casas Foundation (Barcelona).

Following the success of the solo show at ARCOmadrid 2020 by Brazilian artist Túlio Pinto (Brasilia, 1974), who has joined the gallery’s roster, we will present one of his most recent sculptures. Our proposal also includes a series of small-format works on paper by EVRU/ZUSH (Barcelona, 1946), an artist who returned to the national art scene last year with the exhibition “Volver a Ser” (SENDA gallery, 2020), after more than eight years of absence. Madrid-based Cuban artist Glenda Leon (Havana, 1976), after participating in the TEDIUM video art group exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, made up of SENDA artists and the solo show Music of Forms at the MEIAC in Badajoz, will be present with a conceptual work from the series “Every Form is a Form of Time” (2020). We will also have the presence of a new artist, the American Donald Sultan (Asheville, 1951), with a large-format painting. He has just inaugurated his first solo exhibition at SENDA gallery.

Following our previous participations in ARCOmadrid, we will propose to expand our stand with an adjacent space dedicated to an artist’s project, which this year will be dedicated to Carla Cascales.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Sandstorms convert dust into oxygen

Sandstorms originate in deserts when the wind lifts layers of dust and blows them into the atmosphere. The dust can then travel thousands of miles until it falls on the Amazon forest or into the sea. The artist Carla Cascales Alimbau (1989) uses this natural sediment as a pigment, thus turning the powder into raw material for her paintings. The artist was born and currently works in Barcelona. Her work consists of drawings, paintings, and sculptures that evoke minimalist aesthetics with influences of architectural movements such as Brutalism. Likewise, her fascination for the Japanese aesthetics of the “Wabi Sabi” confers her work an idea of beauty based on the concepts of irregularity and impermanence.

In her solo exhibition at ARCO 2021, Carla Cascales highlights that everything in nature is cyclical, in the way that sandstorms are an important source of minerals for the Amazon forest and at the same time influence the growth of plankton. Plankton, apart from being the main food source of marine species, also absorbs large quantities of carbon dioxide and contributes almost 50% of the planet’s oxygen to the atmosphere. In this way, dust from sandstorms is the oxygen we breathe. 

Currently, she is calling for a change in mentality and sensitivity, pushing for a vision of the world understood as an ecosystem in which all species of the planet coexist, united by symbiotic and interdependent relationships. As Donna Haraway argues, “in nature there are no autonomous organisms, rather we are all part of ecosystems integrated into each other”. The series Sandstorms is part of a movement that seeks to restore ecosystems by stopping and reversing the damage we have caused, intending to preserve nature rather than exploit it. 

Her technique also involves some alchemy. Through various sedimentation processes, dust forms the stones from which the artist extracts the pigment, grinding them manually. Thus, the strength of natural pigments is evidenced, when mixed with water they are not dissolved but remain dispersed or suspended in the paint, just as dust from sandstorms does on the sea. The compositional possibilities are infinite, obtaining an almost unlimited range of colors and shades ranging from oxide red to the color of warm soil.

All of them propose an immersive experience in a common universe that is accessed from a multiplicity of approaches and that responds to a single logic: that of artistic creation.

Inspired by their experiences, each artist builds their language, not only as a way to escape from themselves but above all as a communication tool. The delicacy of the supports and materials undergoes a metamorphosis to consolidate into strong works that, however, maintain elegance and softness. The play of textures and contrasts is a constant within the exhibition that, through the various techniques, invites the viewer to enter the particular universe of the works. The exhibition layout of the room itself generates these dialogues.

The artists who star in this exhibition stand out for the echo they generate in their respective communities. Hamada and Cascales intervene in physical spaces, the same ones that Malagrida and Sussman portray. The environment is equally essential in the work of AES + F, which builds a performative microcosm. In León y Jaramillo it is precisely this infinite possibility of the cosmos that inspires his work. The artists expose their way of being and interpreting the world, thus turning art not into a final product, but into the foundation of their expressions.

INTERVENCIONES URBANAS is a collaborative online exhibition that brings together works by Mina Hamada (USA), Antoni Miralda (Spain), Adrián Balseca (Ecuador), Anna Malagrida (Spain), Ola Kolehmainen (Finland) and Massimo Vitali (Italy).

The selected artists share an interest in thinking about the urban scene, whose works are produced using different techniques that, nevertheless, dialogue with each other to build a narrative. Architecture appears as a central subject in the works of Ola Kolehmainen and Adrian Balseca, highlighting the singularity of the buildings and the creation of tensions with their surroundings. These same walls are transformed into a support for the urban art produced by Mina Hamada’s graffiti, thus integrating art into the urban space.

The city, the stage of our daily life, is the background that builds the visual language of Massimo Vitali, Antoni Miralda and Anna Malagrida. Vitali’s human constellations highlight the subtleties of reality, while Miralda and Malagrida make interventions in the spaces, creating games of oppositions that make us reflect politically and aesthetically on the urban landscape.

Through dialogue, INTERVENCIONES URBANAS builds a symbolic universe in which the personal views of each artist invite us to read the urban space and human relations through a new lens.

 

Artsy : https://www.artsy.net/viewing-room/galeria-senda-intervenciones-urbanas

Lab36 exhibits the finalist projects of the II NASEVO International Prize organized by the Ernesto Ventós Foundation. The theme of this edition is the nose and the sense of smell presented by the collage technique. The purpose of this contest is to allow younger artists to show their creations without losing the foundation’s philosophy and values: “Learning to smell through art.”

The winner was the work Horizonte y olfato: eclosión geográfica de un espacio y tiempo silenciado, by Marta de los Pájaros. The artist recreates the universal smell of Gaea (considered Mother Earth in Greek mythology), and that metaphorically represents the smell of humanity. The work raises a reflection on the philosophical disaffection that the western tradition has developed concerning smell.

The Ernesto Ventós Foundation is a family project, full of enthusiasm and a sense of responsibility, arising from the need to share with society through art and the olfactory world, part of what it has given us.

The Foundation was formally created in 2019, but its activities aimed at sharing art from an olfactory perspective already existed in 1996 with the olorVISUAL collection and with NASEVO in 2003.

“DREAMSCAPES AND OTHER TALES” is an online-only group show that brings together a selection of works on paper by artists by Evru/Zush (Spain,1946), Catalina Jaramillo (Colombia, 1981), Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Chile,1967), Gino Rubert (México, 1969) and the collective AES+F (created in Moscow in 1987).

Through different figurative iconographies, the featured artworks explore, complex oneiric landscapes and imaginative scenarios. With a unique aesthetic and stylistic signature, each of them engages with the forces of fear and desire that stand behind the oneiric machinery of the individual and the society at large. Making reference, in some cases, to the psychoanalysis literature, or abandoning themselves to the intuitive process of creation, their authors put into scene particular mythologies, depicting social allegories and paradoxes, opening unexpected windows toward utopias, magic or spiritual realms, or composing tales of erotic scenarios.

While some of these artists are known for their works on paper (Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Catalina Jaramillo and, partially, Evru/Zush), others have employed this medium occasionally, to study the themes and subjects of their paintings or tell particular stories (Gino Rubert) or as part of multi-media projects that include porcelain sculptures and video (AES+F).

A project by Mariella Franzoni

 

Link to the DREAMSCAPES AND OTHER TALES show on Artsy:
https://www.artsy.net/show/galeria-senda-dreamscapes-and-other-tales-works-on-paper-by-aes-plus-f-gino-rubert-catalina-jaramillo-sandra-vasquez-de-la-horra-evru-slash-zush

Túlio Pinto (Brasilia, 1974) develops his artistic research through the force of opposites, generating tensions that challenge the physical laws as gravity while remaining in perfect balance. This harmony is achieved through the perfect weighting of the masses, volume and density of materials of opposite natures and behaviours such as cement, iron, rock, glass, plastic and water.