Mari Puri Herrero: Al salir, cierra la puerta

Miguel Sbastida: Arqueologías climáticas

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery opens two individual exhibitions by Mari Puri Herrero and Miguel Sebastián in which he analyzes the role of nature with different creative and aesthetic processes that dialogue with each other.

In Upon leaving, close the door, Mari Puri Herrero shows us his most recent work. Thirteen works that introduce us to the intimacy of their creative process where introspection is fundamental. Thus, a deep look of the artist herself arises when reviewing her own artistic evolution.

Throughout the exhibition we see how the artist does not stop so much in a literary discursive theme but decides to delve into the themes by studying the lights, colors and shadows. Various themes related to nature emerge, such as that of the night, which is conceived as a foundation where the contrast between the points of light and the deep blues.

An interest in the idea of ​​continuous movement in nature arises. It breaks loose and its abruptness can create spectral figures. A good example of this virulence is the triptych “Conversation”, created ad hoc for the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery, where we see that bower and movement of the trees produced by the wind that ends up shaping two figures of dreamlike air, evoking a memory.

An important constant in Mari Puri Herrero’s work is her interest in oriental arts. Over the years he has reflected and worked hard around the special link between them in drawing and painting. His work has been influenced by this interest, his strokes sometimes of abrupt appearance commune with the delicacy of almost ethereal figures.

In this exhibition, Mari Puri Herrero finally opens the door to her particular world where her main leimotiv will be those almost spectral figures that will be included with such a characteristic and vital movement.

Climate archeologies is the first individual exhibition of Miguel Sbastida in the space of the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery, which brings together a selection of works carried out between 2017 and 2019 around a line of research focused on the processes of environmental collapse and ice ecologies; in which the Madrid artist has been working since 2012.

The exhibition presents three interconnected projects through which it presents a view and reconstruction of the processes of climate change from glacier ice as an archaeological artifact; inviting you to reflect on concepts of absence, instability, temporality and fragility.

The installation of sculptures formed by steel skeletons of fluid shapes and volumes, For as long as possible (Chicago, 2017) is inspired by the Swiss Alps Glaciers, which are covered each year by white thermal fabrics in a futile effort to stop the accelerated loss of their frozen bodies. Slow Violence (Iceland, 2018) gives way to the glacier as an entity capable of narrating its own disappearance through an intervention carried out in an Icelandic glacier, in which a set of sheets of paper are marked by the incessant drip obtained from the thaw The guiding thread of the exhibition is developed around the Archeologies of Climate installation (Madrid, 2017-2019, carried out with the support of the Community of Madrid and La Real Fábrica de Cristales de la Granja); composed of a set of glass columns made from glacier deposit patterns, which takes as a starting point the practice of ice mass drilling and obtaining ice cores as artifacts through which architecture can be studied and reconstructed Earth’s climate.