«Ornithographies. Tracks in the sky» is the first solo exhibition of the artist Xavi Bou in galleria SENDA. For the occasion, he presents 15 of his famous “Ornithographies”, photographs that capture the flight path of birds. His works tangible samples of the balance between art and science, are witnesses of the moments that were past, present and future in the flight of these birds.

Bou’s purpose is, through an exercise of visual poetry, to spread the importance of caring for the environment by inviting viewers to perceive the world with the same curious and innocent gaze of the child we once were. The approach Bou uses to portray the scenes of his “Ornithographies” is not invasive. In fact, he rejects distant study, resulting in images of organic forms that stimulate the imagination.

The photographs capture the flight of very diverse birds in different parts of Catalonia, Spain and even abroad, with a work captured in Uist (Scotland). With photographs taken in coastal places such as Roses, the Illes Medes or Tarifa; as well as in inland places such as Tremp, Monfragüe or Medina-Sidonia; Bou manages to trace that invisible trace to the human eye that birds create when flying through the sky.

His work has been published in international press such as National Geographic, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Geo and Sonntag, among many other publishers. In addition, he has exhibited “Ornithographies” in solo exhibitions in Germany, Belgium, Russia, Spain, Canada, France, Mexico and Greece, among other places in the world. In fact, after the success of his project, in 2023 his “Ornitographies” were published in a book of the same name by Lynx Edicions.

Currently, Bou has initiatives underway that explore other artistic resources and disciplines, such as video, as well as other subjects of study, such as insects. Therefore, the raw material of his work continues to be nature and his personal challenge is to show it in an innovative and aesthetic way that helps the public to approach art and, above all, to raise awareness about the environment.

“Xavi Bou sees himself as a “curator” who tracks down the choreography of birds and makes it visible.” Very rarely, therefore, landscapes or cloud formations in the sky remain visible on the monochrome image backgrounds at the bottom of the picture and may hardly contribute to deciphering the actual image subject without relevant background knowledge.

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– Uta M. Reindl.  Professor, translator, critic and art curator

Galeria SENDA is pleased to present the first exhibition of works on paper by Robert Wilson in a Barcelona gallery on the occasion of his stage production of Der Messias at the Gran Teatre del Liceu.

Although he has achieved universal fame for his work as a stage director and playwright, Robert Wilson’s work is firmly rooted in the fine arts. This accomplished draftsman, painter and video maker is one of the few artists who works in different artistic media without being driven by a single method of creation.

The artist works on his compositions before, during and after the conception of a production. On this occasion, the works capture what Wilson imagined for an act, scene or interlude of The Messiah. Rendered in subtle shades of black and white, they capture on paper ephemeral moments from his latest production. The originals move away from the realistic representation of set design and depict currents of energy, echoing Wilson’s use of light to define the space on stage.

These originals, which are usually presented in sequence, offer subtle variations on the same motif and act as records of his creative process throughout the rehearsals. Created in Berlin and Salzburg and closely related to the evanescence of a moment, it is possible to appreciate them independently of his theatrical work as purely poetic objects.

The strict structure of The Messiah, determined by the alternation between individual numbers for the four vocal soloists and the same number of choral sections, constitutes for Wilson the starting point for a staging that works with surreal images and tries to create a container for the music.

 

«For me, The Messiah is not just a religious work, but a kind of spiritual journey»

– Robert Wilson

 

ABOUT ROBERT WILSON

Born in Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson is one of the world’s foremost theatrical and visual artists. His stage works unconventionally integrate a wide variety of artistic media, including dance, movement, lighting, sculpture, music, and text. His images are aesthetically stunning and emotionally charged, and his productions have earned him global public and critical acclaim. After completing his academic training at the University of Texas and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Wilson founded the New York-based performance collective «The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds» in the mid-1960s and developed his early masterpieces, including Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974-1975). He wrote the influential opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) in collaboration with Philip Glass.

Wilson’s artistic collaborators include a number of writers and musicians such as Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed and Jessye Norman. He has also left his mark on masterpieces such as Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Goethe’s Faust, Homer’s Odyssey, Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Verdi’s La Traviata. Wilson’s drawings, paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions worldwide, and his works are in museums and private collections around the world. Wilson has been the recipient of numerous awards for excellence, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, two Ubu Awards, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale and an Olivier Award.

He was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as of the German Academy of Arts, and holds 8 honorary doctorates. France awarded him the distinction of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (2003) and Officer of the Legion of Honor (2014); and Germany awarded him the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (2014).

Wilson is the founder and artistic director of The Watermill Center, a laboratory for the arts in Water Mill, New York.

In his new work, the artist and photographer Jordi Bernadó travels in search of a world that disappears. Last and Lost is a series of eight photographs displayed in a solo exhibition at Galería Senda starting January 24. These eight pieces are part of a larger project, still ongoing, in which the artist asks himself about the ecological and philosophical challenges of the present. Issues such as sustainability, the relationship between technology and nature, the horizons of the future, and democracy are fundamental in this new work.

The Last and Lost exhibition focuses on the environmental dimension, creating a reflection on the loss and human destruction of nature. The eight photographs portray lost places, ecosystems in danger of extinction, areas uninhabitable due to pollution, or forms of life that struggle to survive. Each image shows a reality that is about to cease to be so. The artist becomes a witness and spectator of an ambiguous state between existing and non-being.

An archive of losses: from the oldest tree in the world, Old Tjikko, in Sweden, whose roots are more than 9,565 years old, to the most remote and inaccessible lake, Lac Télé, in the Republic of the Congo, an immense mirror of sewage in the middle of nature, or the desolate landscapes of Zone Rouge, in France, devastated by the explosives and chemical spills of the First World War, whose entry is prohibited and much of the area is considered unrecoverable.

Bernadó also travels to the Great Blue Hole in Belize, to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, to Racetrack Playa in California and Nevada, to the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia, and to the Doha Desert in Qatar, where the famous sculptures by Richard Serra East-West/West-East. At each destination, he encounters scenes of extinction and yet strange flashes of light.

Bernadó flees alarmism and resignation. It emphasizes the human will and appeals to the desire to nourish life and preserve beauty. It urges us to look into the unknown and question our actions.

His interest in landscape and identity has marked Bernadó’s work throughout his career. In recent years, his interest in the way we tell ourselves about the world—and how we construct fiction about the future and uncertainty—has taken on special relevance in his artistic practice. Last and Lost is the first chapter of an ambitious, long-term project that aims to put these fictions of the world in images and reflect on the possibilities of action (and narration) in the face of contemporary challenges.

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Hand-Painted: Watercolors and Drawings is the first exhibition to present intimate, hand-painted works by Peter Halley, which stand in compelling contrast to the artist’s meticulously executed paintings for which the Neo-Conceptualist American painter is globally known. 

These hand-painted works reveal the unique quality of the artist’s hand through his nuanced brushwork, giving insight into the artist’s approach to his creative process. The genesis of his paintings in these hand-painted works surprisingly reveals Halley’s reliance on spontaneity and improvisation. 

Halley’s new hand-painted watercolors revisit his cartoon-influenced “Exploding Cell” imagery, a theme to which Halley has repeatedly returned since the 1990s in both prints and large-scale installations. 

The drawings serve as scaled color studies for his iconic large-scale paintings — a working method that Halley has used since the 1980s. The exhibition includes four examples from the early 1990s on graph paper, before the artist began composing his paintings on the computer (as is his practice today). In contrast to these early works, the show includes 9 recent drawings executed from the 2021 to the present. 

Gonzalo Guzmán (Madrid, 1991) educated as an industrial designer and has been working in sculpture since the time of the pandemic, when he began to have lucid dreams, an experience that can affect up to 50% of the population at least once in their lives. In them, the subject is aware that he is living a dream and from that point he takes control of his development.

Collision is his first solo exhibition at Galeria SENDA, as part of the Art Nou festival, Barcelona’s emerging art festival, which aims to promote the talent of young artists and, among other things, give them the opportunity to exhibit, as in this case, for the first time in a gallery.

Lucid dreams have marked Gonzalo Guzmán, and as a result of experiencing them, he decided to radically change his life and dedicate himself fully to sculpture in order to capture his dreams. His artistic production is made up of metallic pieces of stainless steel that refer to megalithic monuments such as dolmens, which often appear in his dream world. The creation of sculptures is a form of research to translate these figures into reality. The fact of materialising them enables Guzmán to interact with them on the real plane, and at the same time other people can do so. In addition, the material embodiment of these works raises awareness of how dreams can transform our surroundings.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Collision, a structure that has also been the protagonist of his dreams. This installation is composed of the representation of a three-metre stainless steel stalactite suspended from the ceiling of the gallery on a reflective surface. The reflection of the stalactite on the area generates the illusion that there is also a stalagmite and, therefore, they are two structures that are about to touch. The strength of the composition lies in the closeness of an impossible collision; in the tension of volumes about to collide.

When looking at the installation, the spectator may question whether he is really looking at a six-metre structure or a three-metre structure reflected on a surface. However, neither of the two options is wrong. Likewise, the perception of time is also altered through the presence in the exhibition of an inoperative clock, since when we dream the notion of time fades away. The public will also be able to contemplate other sculptures by the artist present in his dreams that allude to megalithic structures.

The questions suggested by the observation of Collision lead us to reflect on the blurred boundaries between what is and what is not real. This same situation happens in lucid dreams where the unknown remains as to what is part of them, and consequently, the apprehension of reality and our belief system may collide.

The structure is suspended from a false tensioned ceiling illuminated with LED lights, which has been implemented by Barrisol and the company Instalación de Materiales Acústicos y Decorativos (IMAD).

Abaut the artist GONZALO_GUZMAN_SENDA_mayo2023

 

www.barrisol.com / www.imadsa.es