Humid Areas: Ariel Cabrera

Opening 14th September

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the exhibition Humid areas, a solo show by the Cuban artist Ariel Cabrera Montejo, which features around twenty paintings made in the last few months for this exhibition. It is a derivative of the series that make up his entire artistic career, combining various events related to Cuban memory with the review of traditional male archetypes of power, all with one leitmotiv: pleasure.

Cabrera’s compositions contain a myriad of messages and meanings that are the result of the artist’s imagination. Through a work of reinterpretation and reconstruction of historical documents and archives, closer to a filmmaker than a painter, Cabrera composes what might appear to be a collage between “cut-outs” of black and white photographs and colourful scenes of enjoyment. 

This dualism results in his so-called “neo-historicism” through which Cabrera recreates theatrical scenarios inspired by nineteenth-century events such as the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898). But Ariel’s figures are not the solemn and victorious “manbises” or heroic characters depicted in traditional island paintings; instead they are rather anecdotal heroes, less military and more human: with carnal, playful and sensual desires, far from the traditional military archetype. There is no concern for historical accuracy and fidelity, as the protagonists of his paintings are inspired by real people and stories he has encountered in the course of his research. What we find is in any case a mockery of the formalities of history, always a sensitive subject for the political and propagandistic forces of various regimes.

Ariel’s work also has a very personal touch, as it is underlain by the artist’s interest in and knowledge of the history of his native country, as well as his past as a collector of small 19th-century American and European tables, archives, old newspapers and photographs, travel books, his great passion for Italian cinema, and his training in the field of stage design, all of which are coherently transferred to his painting. These elements serve as a formal resource for the artist to develop a style that evokes the impressionist painting of the end of the 19th century, based on rich chromaticism, contrasts of light and colour and different planes. This union between plausible historical reconstructions and archetypes that refer to idyllic scenarios of heroism and eroticism gives life to an idyllic set suspended in time. As in the cinema, everything intertwines in the artist’s head.

BIO
Ariel Cabrera Montejo (1982, Camagüey, Cuba) was trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Camagüey and at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba. He currently lives and works in New York. Since 2014 he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the Americas and Europe. His works are located in both public and private collections in Cuba, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Germany and Italy.

Three different ways: Udo Nöguer, Antonio Murado, Jesús Guerrero

22 June-22 July

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents “Three Different Ways”: Udo Nöger, Antonio Murado, Jesús Guerrero, a group exhibition on display from June 22 until the end of July. The exhibition brings together three artists with a distinct pictorial approach; the Galician Antonio Murado, the german Udo Nöger and the Venezuelan Jesús Guerrero. Through 26 paintings on canvas, board, plaster or paper, the exhibition reveals the parallels and differences offered by each artist, each one with their own thematic and aesthetic contribution but converging in a common artistic language; abstraction.

Antonio Murado (Lugo, Spain, 1964) currently lives in New York. The work shown here is representative of the different styles with which he used to express himself throughout his extensive career, as in the case of his “Marañas y Redes”, (“tangles” or nets”). Murado investigates, among other things, transparencies and explores his interest in nature through mediums such as canvas, wood and aluminum- and experiments with the behavioral properties of paint and varnishes.

Udo Nöger (Enger, Germany, 1961), who works between the USA and Switzerland, is known as the “light artist”, for capturing light effects and movement through eminently minimalist compositions. Apart from the abstract representations of his early works created on canvas and handmade paper, which are reminiscent of cave paintings or pictograms, Nöger is especially known for his monochrome works in shades of grey, which emulate a light of their own. The artist achieves this effect by spreading several strips of cloth or canvas on a frame, which in turn have been previously painted or cut.

For the Venezuelan Jesús Guerrero (Tovar, Venezuela, 1965), this is his first exhibition in Spain, where he emigrated motivated by the critical social and economic situation in his native country. Guerrero began his relationship with art as a child and since then he has moved in the field of abstraction. His work is characterized by historical revisionism, with an important influence from European avant-garde movements such as de Stijl, Russian constructivism or Minimalism. Guerrero experiments with materials such as zinc, acrovinyl and waxed enamel. “The human figure was a challenge for me, but afterwards I felt that I had nothing more to say with the figure, I was never able to find the psychology of the character as a subject” says the artist.

The exhibition offers visitors a wide variety of works in different formats and materials and presents three ways of understanding painting, through the exploration of light, colour, geometry and matter, which apparently do not have much in common but which, nevertheless, appear to be in a perfect dialogue with each other.

Jose Cháfer

Cuerpo y Alma

20 April – 10 June 2023

On April 20, Álvaro Alcázar Gallery opens Cuerpo y Alma, a solo exhibition where artist Jose Cháfer introduces his latest works. The exhibition presents around thirty unpublished sculptures, most of them unique pieces made of stone, bronze and wood. Furthermore, the artist has incorporated natural materials which he had barely used in his previous works, such as walnut, black poplar and Calatorao marble. The show includes small and large format sculptures, made in direct carving or bentwood, as well as suspended works, free-standing or wall-mounted.

For his first great solo exhibition, Cháfer has felt the need to share a conceptual aspect of his work, hence its title Cuerpo y Alma (Body and Soul). Starting from a previous style, starring sculptures of infinite trajectories which are the soul and essence of his work, Cháfer now takes a step further, incorporating into his pieces a sort of “skin”, turning them into authentic “bodies”. Bodies that are linked to solidity, earthly and mortal, in opposition to the average features which characterize the soul, such as lightness, infinity or eternity. 

Although Cháfer wants to transmit with his works the personal concept that ” there is no body without soul”, this exhibition has also been a technical challenge for the artist, as he now explores new forms in his creative process to continue advancing in his studies.

Beyond the symbolic aspect, in formal terms Cháfer remains faithful to one of the elements that have most attracted his attention since the beginning of his career as a sculptor: the curves, continuous lines that constantly change direction. This time, however, starting from sculptures based on the exploration of paths and voids, he now investigates concepts such as mass and tensions, which particularly attract his attention because they allow him to understand how they are capable of fulfilling a space that used to be empty.

During the exhibition, it will become clear, through the presence of natural materials and the need to give body to the soul of his works, how Cháfer maintains a particular connection with the environment, which has always been fundamental in his own narrative.

BAD 2023

Bordeaux,  4 – 7 May 2023

For its second edition, Álvaro Alcázar Gallery will participate once again at BAD Fair (Bordeaux + Art + Design), presenting a selection of works by various of its Spanish and international artists (Rafael Canogar, Peter Krauskopf, Juan Garaizabal, David Nash, Nigel Hall, Kepa Garraza, Antonio Murado, Eduardo Arroyo).

David Nash

Recent Works

26 January – march 2023

On January 26th, Gallery Alvaro Alcázar will present a solo show dedicated to the British artist David Nash (b. 1945, UK), an exhibition that addresses the most recent production of this renowned artist based in Wales. The show presents different disciplines, highlighting the sculptural work, both in wood and in bronze and iron, as well as drawing on paper. The 24 works presented here, in small and large formats, are arranged inside the gallery in an apparently chaotic way that inevitably reminds us of a natural forest.

David Nash, with a career spanning over 40 years, is considered one of the main representatives of British Land Art. Wood; in particular the tree itself, is his main working material. For Nash, using the tree entails enormous symbolism.  Due to its density, growth and proliferation, the tree finds a parallel with life itself,  and its structure, made up of roots, trunk and branches, allude to three worlds; the subterranean, the terrestrial and the celestial. Nash investigates the morphology of the tree, the natural characteristics of its wood, as well as the mutations produced by the hand of man. To this end, the artist has been trained as a tree expert, studying the morphology of each species he works with, mainly redwoods, oaks, beech wood or maple wood. The wooden works presented here give a good example of this and, in fact, they only come from wood from trees that have fallen naturally or have been felled due to age or disease. From these felled trees emerge forms such as eggs, (Opened Scaled Egg), columns (Squark Column or Lined Beach Column), domes, spheres and pyramids (Flare), some of his most characteristic forms.

In addition to wood, the exhibition presents half a dozen sculptures in bronze, a material that Nash began to work with in the 1990s and whose treatment again alludes to wood, as in King and Queen III, Red Column and Black Cairn. The use of this material was motivated by the artist’s desire to preserve forms for posterity without interfering with the physical condition of the original wooden objects. Nash also appreciates the material’s capacity for transformation when heated and melted. Iron, also present in this exhibition, is formed by one of nature’s most elemental processes and is extracted at high temperatures, something which is highly appreciated by the artist.

Furthermore, charcoal has played an important role in Nash’s artistic work since the early 1980s, whether in wooden pieces that have been charred or in bronze sculptures that allude to the wooden ones, or, as in this case, in the drawings that accompany the sculptures. Drawing has always been an important element in David Nash’s production and is also used to document his entire creative process. His technique consists of applying the raw pigment directly to the paper, incorporating halos of colour around the main form. Although charcoal black predominates, he sometimes incorporates other tones from nature, which allude, for example, to the changing colour of oak leaves depending on the month or the season of the year, as in Oak Leaves Through May, where he goes from orange to yellow to bright green.

This exhibition is a unique opportunity to approach the work of an international artist of such importance, whose work has not been exhibited monographically in our country for more than half a decade and where the monumentality of the works on display will leave no one indifferent.

KEPA GARRAZA:

NUEVO MONUMENTALISMO. WE JUS WANT TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE

November 3rd, 2022 – January 12th, 2023 

The opening of our next exhibition will take place on November 3rd. We will present the new exhibition of Kepa Garraza that revolves around his two new projects New monumentalism and We just want to set the world on fire. Both series present a fictitious reality that invites the viewer to stop and reflect and to question, on the one hand, the nature of the monument, its raison d’être and its usefulness, and on the other, how social conflicts are currently represented and the role played by the media.

New Monumentalism is his most recent project. It invites the viewer to reflect on the function of the public monument within the urban environment, as well as to ask questions related to the representation of power and authority in our collective imagination. To this end, he has devised a game of substitution that invites the viewer to rethink concepts related to the very nature of the monument.

We just want to set the world on fire is a series that emerged as a consequence of the wave of protests that swept the world after the lifting of restrictions following the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. These protests were widespread and seemingly spontaneous. A wave of indignation and anger that spread unchecked to all corners of the globe. Revolts caused by the widespread impoverishment of large sectors of the world’s population and the ineffectiveness of many governments to take care of their most basic needs.

APERTURA MADRID GALLERY WEEKEND 2022

SHADOWPIECES

8  – 11 Septiembre 2022

Shadowpieces is an exhibition of works spanning the past three years of the abstract painter Peter Krauskopf’s practice. Instead of presenting a concluded body of paintings, the artist has opted for a conscious confrontation of subjects he deals with in his oeuvre. In earlier works, dense forms and seemingly computer-generated gradients illuminate or obscure each other, manipulating a central motif of painting itself. Newer canvasses are testament to a more conceptual interrogation on the character of color and its depths: the luscious, thickly applied oil colors are successively layered, only to be unearthed again by the painter with formal precision. Peter Krauskopf’s pictorial cosmos unfolds in the tension between the virtually algorithmic control he wields over his craft and the unpredictable nature inherent in his medium. 

Shadowpieces refers to the spaces of light and dark left behind by Krauskopf in his works: his technique creates fields from which light appears to seep, and others into which it seems to plunge. However, the title does not hide the artist’s intuitive preference for the shadow as an agent. With their plasticity, Krauskopf’s paintings inescapably assign one side or the other to the space in front of them. Most of the time, the painter — and later the viewer — is cast into a position from which the light appears to emanate from beyond the canvas. 

Peter Krauskopf’s works are abstract, but the non-figurative is constantly fed by the artist’s everyday experiences. Through painting, his intuitions return to reality as genuine images. To complicate the frontier between abstraction and fiction is an intentional choice in this process of reconstruction. The same holds true for the short texts, which accompany certain works in the exhibition and relate personal experiences. The accounts of the situations are clearly his, but did they really occur the way he describes them? Instead of trying to explain the paintings, the texts pose a question. A question about the realness of storytelling, and the realness of the storyteller; a question about the realness of painting, and the realness of the painter.

COMUNIDAD

May 26th – July 21st 2022

On 26 May, Gallery Alvaro Alcázar gallery presents the group exhibition Community, which can be visited until 21 July. The exhibition addresses different perspectives of the vast concept of Community, ranging from an intimate and individualistic vision, to a much more collective approach, which presents a social group with common characteristics. The exhibition presents 17 works in different techniques, sizes and medium by 16 different artists, all of them linked by a common connection, the concept of community in its different approaches; through cities such as New York, buildings, people, symbols or landscapes. 

Among the participating artists, it stands out the presence of artists from the gallery, as in the case of Rafael Canogar with one of his most recent methacrylates, Simon Edmondson with an unpublished oil on canvas or Kepa Garraza who shows us a representation of his series Just want to set the world on fire. Cristina Babiloni attracts attention with an imposing 4m high polyptych representing the seabed. Equally noteworthy is the presence of Guillem Nadal with his Project for an Island or the recently added to the gallery’s list of artists, Jose Cháfer, with his first bronze sculpture. Eduardo Arroyo presents a stone sculpture that refers to the delusional story of Carmen Amaya during her stay at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, which was precisely one of the most famous themes in the artist’s career.

Also noteworthy is the contribution of invited artists, such as the Galician artist Jorge Barbi, this time with sculptural works that, as is usual in his production, are made from objects found in the countryside. The artist Andreu Alfaro presents an emblematic sculpture that embodies the goddess Aphrodite. Photography is represented on the one hand by the Sevillians Paz Juristo and Anuca Aísa, the first with the image of a New York skyscraper and the second with a work that is part of her “subsuelos” series. On the other hand, the French photographer Julien Spiewak presents a work from his “Corps de Style” series, where, as usual, a naked body appears next to a fragment of an interior, in this case a column, which reminds us of the mentioned Aphrodite of Alfaro. The painter Montserrat Gómez-Osuna also treats an urban scene, a building, a structure that is difficult to identify and disturbing, on acrylic board.

Lastly, we should also point out the work of foreign artists, such as Matthew Benedict, with his iconic “Hazel Witch”, or the Russian Andrei Roiter, who has sent a large-format canvas representing cardboard boxes. Finally, the French painter Jude Castel, with his particular mastery of the ballpoint pen, has made two works expressly for this exhibition within the series of urban memories. With all this, we are facing an exhibition with first-rate artists and a great diversity of genres with no apparent relationship, but under which a common concept underlies: that of community.