The exhibition brings together the artists who have participated in the Instagram initiative “Welcome Home”, by featuring a selection of the artworks they produced within their domestic confinement, during the lockdown. Ranging from painting to photography, video, drawing, and sculpture, the works result from the drive of their authors to overcome the challenges of the quarantine through imaginative and ingenuous ways of doing and thinking, within and beyond art-making practices. Hence turning their domestic space and time of confinement into an inspiration enabler.

Recalling the 1968 epic science fiction movie 2001 A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubric, DOMESTIC ODYSSEYS addresses the exploration of an unknown domestic life – as opposed to the unknown extraterrestrial life of the futuristic movie. Echoing the voyage to Jupiter imagined by Kubric, the exhibition theme offers a pretext to re-think our relationship with our domestic environment – an intimate space that, during the confinement, has suddenly and paradoxically turned into an unfamiliar and, sometimes, unsettling place of dwelling, into otherness.

 And yet, having transformed their homes into temporary studios (or vice versa), and hence, making a virtue of necessity, the artists of the DOMESTIC ODYSSEYS exhibition have been able to find the most authentic inspiration in their new domestic space. In some way, the artworks featured in the exhibition are the repository of untold intimate domestic tales, joys, and struggles – what we would call «domestic odysseys» – as well as of the desire to re-domesticate our unknown dwelling spaces.

Although they saw their exhibitions and plans for 2020 canceled or postponed, by reinventing themselves within precarious and temporary contingencies, once again they have shown to the world that art, as a form of knowledge production, can acquire multiple shapes, but it never ceases to be and manifest itself. Like in other moments in history, artists have been able to challenge the most critical times, turning art into an inspiring and resilient way of thinking, being, and doing differently.

TEDIUM is a video art screening program, co-curated by Galeria SENDA and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts of Moscow, which features the work of Spanish and Latin American artists with whom Galeria Senda has collaborated throughout almost thirty years: Glenda León (Cuba, 1976), Teresa Serrano (Mexico, 1936), Miguel Angel Rios (Argentina, 1953), Anna Malagrida (Spain, 1970), Isabel Rocamora (Spain, 1968), Adrián Balseca (Ecuador, 1989) and Miralda (Spain, 1942).

With this initiative, the Pushkin Museum invites Galeria SENDA to participate in the museum’s 100 WAYS TO LIVE A MINUTE, a digital project “where people who create and reflect on art share their experiences of meaningful living of time”.

While the curatorial concept behind the program revolves around the notion of “tedium” — understood as a human emotion of inquietude, that results from a particular experience of time —  the final video art selection (defined jointly by SENDA and Pushkin Museum) offers to the digital public of both institutions an overview of the work of some of the most interesting artists from the Ibero-American artistic panorama, who employ the medium of video to explore intimate themes or to address identity, inquietudes and social matters.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” said the seventeenth-century theologist and scientist Blaise Pascale. And yet, these days, we are learning not to fear the silence of time. Confined in our domestic space and forced to reduce our social life and work activity, we experience time’s most unexpected dimensions. Dealing with an unknown pacing of seconds, minutes, hours and days, we are learning to domesticate tedium — an intimate human emotion that has been an object of fascination and exploration of poets and philosophers for centuries — from Lucrecio to Leopardi, to Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, amongst many others. In this instance, we might also discover that tedium can be a prelude for new ideas, unexpected sense of awareness or artistic inspiration.

Art can teach us a lot about unconventional ways of conceiving and experiencing time. In particular, video art is devoted to a distinct aesthetic (and politics) of time perception, often recalling the emotion of tedium: it breaks with the established modes of moving image storytelling of television and cinema, offering unconventional narrative timing to the eyes and the hears. In some way, video art turns us into pensive spectators, inclined to the patient awaiting of the unexpected, which might never come.

SENDA’s passion for video art is cultivated by supporting artists that work with video and moving images techniques, as well as by fomenting the culture of collecting video art in different ways. For instance, the director of SENDA, Carlos Durán, is the co-founder of the LOOP Barcelona festival and fair, a polyhedric international event, entirely dedicated to moving images arts. Celebrating its 18th edition in November 2020, LOOP has turned Barcelona into a reference of the international video art scene.

The video works featured in TEDIUM will be exclusively broadcasted by Pushkin Museum as part of their 100 WAYS TO LIVE A MINUTE on-line project, in a section, specially designed for this collaboration, of the website https://100waystoliveaminute.pushkinmuseum.art/?lang=en.

TEDIUM will unfold in three appointments: Saturday, May 30, Wednesday June 3, and Saturday June 6. Each day, at 19.00 Moscow time, a series of video artworks will be presented to the public and made available to be watched for 24 hours.

Saturday, May 30 (19:00 Moscow time  / 18:00 Barcelona time)

Glenda León (Cuba, 1976):

Hablando con Dios / Talking to God (2018)

Espejismo II / Mirage II (2019)       

Cada Respiro II  / Each Breath II (2015) 

Suspension / Suspension (2003) 

Anna Malagrida (Spain, 1970):

_El Limpiador de Cristales / The Window Cleaner (2010)

_Frontera / Border (2009)

_Danza de Mujer  / Woman Dance (2007)

Wednesday, June 3 (19:00 Moscow time  / 18:00 Barcelona time)

Adrian Balseca (Ecuador, 1989):

_Grabador Fantasma / Phantom Recorder (2018)

_Suspensión I  / Suspension I (2019) 

_Medio Camino  / Halfway (2010)

Miguel Ángel Ríos (Argentina, 1943):

_Landlocked (2014)

_Piedras Blancas / White Stones(2014)

_Mulas / Mules (2014)

Saturday, June 6 (19:00 Moscow time  / 18:00 Barcelona time)

Isabel Rocamora (Spain, 1968):

_Horizonte de Exilio / Horizon of Exile (2007)

Teresa Serrano (Mexico, 1936):

_A Room of Her Own (2003)

Miralda (Spain, 1955):

_Apocalypse Lamb New York (1989–2018)

_Apocalypse Lamb Barcelona (1997–2018)

The new paintings presented by Peter Halley in Barcelona embody an important step in his career. The classic “cells” and “prisons” with or without a “circuit”, now expand, reshaping the edges of the canvas and leaving the rectangle behind.
Being true to his imagery – created already in the 80s – Halley introduces his sixth exhibition at Galeria Senda, the most committed one.

The colour palette of this new series also manifests a significant change. With an abundance of fluorescent yellow, violets and, above all, pinks (clear, warm and intense), Halley’s compositions become particularly luminous. The artist plays with different layers of preparation to give consistency and depth to the pictorial surface, as well as the use of “Roll-A-Tex”, a lumpy commercial paint, very popular in the 70s and 80s for home decoration, which has accompanied the artist for decades. With this, Halley creates contrasts of textures and reliefs between the compositional elements and combines the industrial and urban register with the sensuality of a tactile experience.

Peter Halley became known in the mid-eighties in New York as the driving force behind Neo-conceptualism, a current that appears as a reaction to Neo-Impressionism and which represents a resurgence of geometric abstraction. His style reflects the idea of language as a stable and self-referential system, and criticises the transcendental claims of minimalism. Furthermore, his work is influenced by the social theory of Structuralism, which proposes the analysis of socio-cultural systems and languages, based on deep symbolic configurations and structures that condition and determine everything that occurs in human activity.

“In our culture, geometry is usually considered a sign of the rational.  I, for whatever reason, have reversed that idea in my mind, and geometry,  has a primarily psychological rather than intellectual significance”, he states in his essay “Geometry and the Social” of 1991.

Thus, the cells and conducts that Peter Halley articulates and combines in his canvases are not a simple abstract geometric composition, but rather a symbolic image of the social schemes that surround us. In this way, the turning point in the format that Halley presents in the exhibition New Paintings in Senda Gallery also reflects a turn in his analysis of the models of organisation and communication in contemporary societies.

Examining these new works, it can be seen that these cells no longer fit into the regular structure of the canvas, but rather – as a metaphor of today’s society – establish a different relationship with it.  Opting for free and open forms, the cells impose their own designs, challenging the rectangular and immobile structure of the traditional canvas.  The irregular compositions that result from these formal searches by Peter Halley, although rigorously balanced and harmonious, seem to describe the profound changes in society in the digital era, as well as in the system of cognitive work.  Thus, through an internal metamorphosis in Halley’s iconic visual language, the American artist’s pictorial discourse echoes the flow of information generated by the new technologies, as well as the new communication regimes, usually dominated by the younger generation.

Escritos sobre arte (Senda Ensayo, 2020), the volume to be presented in the context of Peter Halley’s New Paintings exhibition is the first Spanish translation of the most innovative and personal essays written by Halley from 1981 to 2001. While offering a critical view of the changes affecting the field of art and culture in the period of so-called “post-modernity”, these texts offer a different approach to Peter Halley’s experience and his exquisite intellectual work.

With the exhibition “To be again” Evru/Zush returns to the art scene after a forced retirement due to health issues.

 

We find ourselves in front of a long series of small pencil drawings, on which he worked exclusively and intensely in these last years. In these works, the artist features hybrid beings with a human face and a snake body. These figures reveal metamorphic organisms through a dreamlike style that mixes reality and fantasy. The figures are structured through a network of nerves, veins or lymphatic channels in which their drives and moods -such as vitality, survival instinct, bodily pleasures or sexuality – flow, filtered through a primitive, intuitive spontaneity. These works have served as a way for art therapy or as cathartic relief for his feelings, and hence as a way of expressing emotions throughout time. 

In 1968, after spending a period in a psychiatric hospital of Barcelona, due to the possession of weed, the young artist Albert Porta decided to become Zush and to start a creative self-healing strategy. At the same time, he created the Evrugo Mental State,  establishing an imaginary territory and personalizing universal symbols associated with the idea of the state. In this way, he created an alphabet (the Asura), a currency (Los Tucares), as well as a hymn, a flag, and a passport. In the following 33 years, he employed the name Zush. However, after his retrospective exhibition at MACBA in 2001, he dismantles this alter ego. The disappearance of Zush gives way to the birth of Evru, a figured often defined as a ArtCienMist – a neologism that encompasses the artist concepts, scientist and mystic, and that embraces the technological and digital language and tools of the new era. 

During the creative process of To Be Again, Evru/Zush realized that the drawings he was working on corresponded to the iconographic structure of the Nagas representations, Hindu deities with human face and torso, generally female figure with a snake-like body. In this way, the constant desire to be Evru again materializes in this exhibition with the representation of reptile-beings that, as the artist himself, shed their skin in a natural process of renovation and growth. This will of transformation is a constant in his career through moments of inflection that allow him to reflect on concepts such as identity, alterity or the pass of time. Thus, this survival instinct and the will to rebirth is the declaration of intentions of a transgressive and unclassifiable artist that refuses and reaffirms himself more and more resounding and immortal.

Evru/Zush’s work has been shown in museums and institutions around the world. He has participated in historical exhibitions such as Sao Paulo Biennale (1967 and 1979), the Documenta VII in Kassel (1977) and Les Magiciens de la Terre organized by Jean Hubert-Martin at Centre Pompidou (1989). In 1975 he is awarded a scholarship by the Juan March Foundation, while in the ‘80s he receives a scholarship by DAAD. Since then, he begins to employ digital technology, coining the term PsicoManualDigital, receiving the prize Laus in 1999. More recently, in 2019 he participated in the 16ª Biennal of Istambul, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. His work is part of important privates and public collections as the Centre Georges Pompidou (París), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the MoMA (New York), the Fondation Cartier (París), the MNCARS (Madrid), the MACBA (Barcelona) or the IVAM (Valencia).

PRESS ARTICLES