Cristina Babiloni: AQUARIUM

CRISTINA BABILONI – AQUARIUM

Inauguration 12 de septiembre 2024

Cristina Babiloni’s latest exhibition, Aquarium, opens on September 12, 2024, at the Gallery Alvaro Alcazar in Madrid. Babiloni, an artist hailing from Castellón, has previously captivated audiences in New York and Andorra with her individual exhibitions. This new showcase reaffirms her commitment to exploring aquatic themes, even in a city like Madrid, far from the sea.

In Aquarium, Babiloni continues her exploration of marine environments, presenting a thought-provoking and immersive experience. Her work is divided into two distinct yet interconnected parts. The first section features large and medium-format burlap pieces, where Babiloni employs a rich palette of pigments and materials to create evocative underwater scenes and coral reefs. These artworks invite viewers to metaphorically “dive” into the sea, engaging with its depths through intricate textures and vibrant colors. The artist has expanded on her previous techniques, incorporating new ecosystems and richer hues to enhance the visual impact of her work.

On the other side of the gallery, Babiloni presents a novel series of fish casts made from methacrylate, showcasing her innovative approach and experimentation with materials. This use of methacrylate represents a new direction in her practice, adding fresh dimensions to her art and underscoring her ongoing quest for artistic exploration.

Babiloni, who also holds a background in psychology, views her art as a therapeutic tool, aiming to restore mental well-being through the power of admiration. She believes that each painting serves as a vehicle for meditation and natural immersion, merging chromotherapy with visual art to evoke emotional responses. According to Babiloni, her work provides a form of introspection and solace, acting as a balm for the soul.

In her exhibition, Babiloni emphasizes the profound connection between humans and nature. She argues that emotional engagement with her art is crucial, as it fosters a deeper understanding of the natural world—a space of immense strength and beauty that we must strive to protect. Through her use of color, texture, and form, Babiloni recreates aquatic environments that offer a sensory journey, highlighting the delicate interplay of light and shadow, as well as the organic forms that bring her “living entities” to life.

Overall, Aquarium is not just a display of artistic skill but an invitation to reflect on our relationship with nature and find solace in its representation.

Catálogo
Listado de obras

Cristina Babiloni: AQUARIUM2024-09-14T14:43:02+00:00

BAD + 2024

BAD + 2024

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery is once again participating in the new edition of the BAD+ fair in Bordeaux, France. For this occasion, the gallery is presenting a stand featuring the works of various national and international artists.

Sculptures by David Nash, Pim Palsgraaf, and José Cháfer will be accompanied by paintings created by Antonio Murado, Simon Edmondson, Ariel Cabrera, Rebeca Plana, and Rubén Tortosa, among others. With this assembly of works, diverse themes such as nature, leisure, and abstraction will bring life to a stand filled with color.

Nash’s natural elements are cohesively integrated with Cháfer’s ash wood sculpture, whose curves evoke the grooves traced in Wolfgang Flad’s painting. Regarding the paintings, Antonio Murado’s ethereal flowers composed of glazes connect with Simon Edmondson’s transparencies. Edmondson has presented two paintings that pay homage to studios—spaces of introspection and expressiveness for the artist. This is not the only conceptual idea of the stand. With enormous sculptures reflecting on the decay of the modern world, Pim Palsgraaf brings urban ruins to life, creating a contrast between the human and the purity of nature. On the other hand, Rebeca Plana and Rubén Tortosa also explore the conceptual with their work “Debe/haber,” in which language collaborates with abstraction to re-signify concepts. This idea aligns with the work represented by Ariel Cabrera, who transforms reality through a historical and cultural prism to recreate everyday spaces from a new perspective.

In short, our proposal brings together the work of different artists to highlight the expressive and symbolic capacity of each one. The sum of the parts makes our stand a collection of ideas that converge in a visual dialogue, inviting the viewer to explore the multiple layers of meaning present in each work.

Catalogue
List of works
BAD + 20242024-05-31T17:13:57+00:00

Mari Puri Herrero: el color de los días

MARI PURI HERRERO: EL COLOR DE LOS DÍAS

April 23

On April 13th, the Alvaro Alcázar gallery presents the monographic exhibition “El color de los días” (The Color of the Days) by artist Mari Puri Herrero (1942, Bilbao), where the most recent production of this veteran painter is addressed. The exhibition brings together around thirty of her works on paper, immersing us in a world where pigment, nature, and the enigmatic take a protagonist role. Due to her great technical mastery, the artist manages to elevate the paper support to the category of the most refined painting, thus blending drawing and painting into one.

Herrero’s presented work has been created over the past three years and represents a continuity in her extensive career, remaining faithful to her style characterized by constant references to nature, landscape, but also the human figure. Her papers capture images of everyday life that also coexist with the disparity of dreams. References that border on abstraction and are shrouded in a halo of mystery and silence. Mari Puri once again draws from her personal experiences or places such as Menagaray, in Álava, Bilbao or Madrid.

It is in this phantasmagorical universe where the artist turns color and drawing into the main allies of her work. Different shades of blacks, blues, oranges, purples, and bright reds are associated with technique to challenge reality. Giving equal importance to method and form, drawing also contributes to the cause. In this case, the automatism of the technique brings the figures to life and color elevates the works to the sphere of surrealism with expressionist undertones. Herrero once again reveals herself as an excellent draftswoman, paying close attention to detail, from the choice of handmade paper, the theme, and above all, the treatment of drawing. Likewise, the predominantly vertical format of the papers is remarkable, it accentuates the content of the works themselves; tall cypresses, elongated human silhouettes, or small fragments of paper glued as collages, which take on fusiform shapes and seem to rise.

This exhibition is an opportunity to see the work of this artist, as a prelude to the upcoming major retrospective exhibition prepared by the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao.

Biography

Mari Puri is one of the most renowned living artists on the Basque scene. Since her education, she has lived in places like Amsterdam, Paris, or Madrid, although she has never neglected her secluded life in nature. At the age of 17, she moved to Madrid to attend engraving workshops, draw from life at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, and immerse herself in art in the various museums of the capital. In 1966, she received a scholarship from the Diputación de Bizkaia and the Dutch Government to continue her studies in Amsterdam, particularly at the Rijksakademie. After encountering the work of great artists, both ancient and contemporary, her work acquired a more symbolic sense, and after her stay in Paris and her return to Spain, she began an intense exhibition activity, both in painting and engraving. She has continued with long temporary stays in Paris until recently. Whether as a painter, engraver, or sculptor, Mari Puri Herrero has become a notable creator at the national level.

In Madrid, April 2024

Catalogue
List of works
Alicia Chillida’s Text
Mari Puri Herrero: el color de los días2024-04-17T11:13:28+00:00

Rebeca Plana: UNTDELEMN

REBECA PLANA: UNTDELEMN

April 19

The Chirivella Soriano Foundation and the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana are pleased to present the exhibition “Untdelemn,” a showcase inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the artistic and spiritual universe of Valencian artist Rebeca Plana (Albalat de la Ribera, 1976). Under the direction of curator Álvaro Alcázar, this exhibition will be open to the public from April 19 to June 23 at the Palau Joan de Vaeliona, an emblematic space of Valencian civil Gothic architecture.

The exhibition takes its name from “Untdelemn,” a word that, although originating from ancient Romanian refers to the most exquisite oil used in purification rituals. For Rebeca Plana, “Untdelemn” becomes a metaphor for the act of “painting from the soul,” where painting not only calms and heals but also activates her nervous system. The exhibition presents around 60 works, most of which were created recently and especially for this exhibition. These works reflect a vital stage in the artist’s career, marked by biological and mental maturity, as well as personal growth. But it is also a dialogue between different forms of art; music, literature, and sculpture converge in Rebeca’s works, enriching their meaning and depth. The influence of artists such as Franco Battiato, Konstantinos Kavafis, and David Nash is evident throughout the exhibition, adding layers of interpretation to each work.

Rebeca Plana’s distinctive style is characterized by refined abstraction and a palette of subtle colors. Her works are marked by energetic, dynamic, and expressive strokes, revealing a unique combination of premeditation and improvisation. This exhibition represents an evolution in her style, highlighting greater simplicity and essentiality in her work, without losing the depth and intensity that characterize it. This exhibition marks a milestone in her career and represents a celebration of a decade of creativity and artistic exploration. 

About the artist:

Rebeca Plana (Albalat de la Ribera, 1976) graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia in 2000. She received Honors in her final degree project specializing in painting. She completed her training at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon and at the Colegio de España in Paris. Since completing her studies, she has participated in artistic residencies and received awards and scholarships such as the Habitat Artistic Scholarship (Castellón City Council – EACC), the Piramidon Residence Scholarship (Barcelona), the O Barco de Valdeorras Foundation Scholarship (Orense), the Picasso Museum Residence Scholarship (Málaga), the Rodríguez Acosta Foundation Scholarship, and awards such as the Senyera Painting Prize of Valencia, the Ateneo Mercantil de Valencia, or the Honorable Mention in the BMW Prize.

Rebeca Plana’s work has also been showcased in solo exhibitions, in museums and galleries, such as the Sala Gallera (Valencia), the Fernando Latorre Gallery (Madrid), or Galería Punto (Valencia), as well as at the Colegio de España in Paris and the Royal Tapestry Factory. She has participated in various group exhibitions in spaces such as the IberCaja Zaragoza, Casa de Vacas Madrid, or the Antonio Pérez Foundation of Cuenca. She also actively participates in fairs alongside the galleries that represent her in Contemporary Art Fairs such as JustMad (Madrid), ARCO (Madrid), and Gante Artfair (Belgium).

Curator’s text
Rebeca Plana: UNTDELEMN2024-04-18T09:39:55+00:00

La Isla Taller

JUAN GOPAR: LA ISLA TALLER

January 25 – March 16

Álvaro Alcázar gallery opens on 25 January, La isla taller, by Juan Gopar, in which the artist from Lanzarote returns to Madrid with a large monographic exhibition, just 30 years after his last show in Madrid, at the Gamarra y Garrigues gallery. This is Gopar’s first solo exhibition in our gallery and with it he joins the list of represented artists. 

The exhibition presents a collection of paintings, sculptures and works on paper created on the island of Lanzarote between 1994 and 2021. These works not only reflect Gopar’s commitment to the art, culture and history of the islands, but also explore the unique intersection between his art and the objects found on the shores, washed up on the ocean currents. The juxtaposition in Gopar’s work between painting and these objects reveals forces of growth, shipwreck and catastrophe.

 

La Isla taller is constructed as a poetic ecosystem in which the real and the creative imagination intertwine their roots in a fascinating symbiosis. As happens with lichens, those organisms that arise from the collaboration between fungi and unicellular algae, and that from minimal units cover vast territories, Gopar’s work brings together the micro and the macro, from the insular shore to the enormous rooms of the cosmos. It is the greatness of the brief, so brilliantly expressed by Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Espacio. The duality of immensity and smallness, an eternal cycle of union and disunion that is always immobile towards the origin. This dynamic of opposites does nothing other than return to the idea that unity is born of duality, a principle that resonates in the ambiguous existence of painting, always suspended between inside and outside, between the eternal and the ephemeral, between its own materiality and the real. “The gods had no more substance than what I have. But here, in La isla taller, the “I” is none other than painting itself. In the huts entitled Metáforas – in Gopar these “architectures” must be understood as “liberated painting” – this idea appears in a very emphatic way: the form is embodied in its own signifier. Manuel Padorno says: “Mine is a beautiful workshop: the island”. 

Living thus reveals itself as an approach towards the centre, towards the stone: everything that happens takes place within a totality – place and time – which is at the same time our consciousness. What happens in us resonates in the spheres and what happens in the spheres vibrates in us. Our eyes are thus the eyes of the cosmos: the eyes with which the cosmos sees itself.What we see is thus the consciousness of the universe. In this rocking we find a dance of our own, the stamp of the rhythm that defines us: between the inner abode and the epicentre of our experience. In the series Walkabout (The Strokes of Song) the small joins the large in an endless resonance: the coloured surface is transformed into depth, it becomes a stellar mirror. The spectator is swayed by this rhythm that is both intimate and universal. A totality where each event, as in the lichen that embraces rocks and trees, flourishes and contributes to the richness of the whole.

La Isla Taller2024-01-25T16:19:36+00:00

Andrei Roiter: Open

Andrei Roiter: OPEN

Opening November 16th 2023

Closing January 2024

On November 16th, Álvaro Álcazar Gallery presents the solo exhibition of Moscow-born artist Andrei Roiter (1960), a show that features around twenty works made in the last few years, including paintings and a sculpture. Twelve years after his solo exhibition at the Fúcares Gallery, the artist returns to Madrid with a major exhibition that will be on view until mid-January 2024. 

Andrei Roiter’s work is a compilation of a whole series of personal experiences, starting from his youth —marked by Soviet totalitarianism— and spanning to the present global, political climate. Issues such as emigration, voluntary exile and a search for self- identity, are present in the artist’s iconographic repertoire, either explicitly or as a symbolic reference. Thus, one of the recent elements that Roiter repeats the most is the rectangle with the circle in the center, as in “Opening” #2, #3 and #4, where the artist is speaking to us of openness and escape. One of his favorite works of his old friend, Ilya Kabakov, is “Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment”, the installation piece that includes a hole in the ceiling of an apartment through which the occupant ejected himself into space. Roiter relates autobiographically to the work, as he himself fled Russia at the end of the 80’s. 

Roiter is also inspired by other artists who interact with spacial boundaries, such as Lucio Fontana and Gordon Matta-Clark, who used empty buildings as a medium to open huge holes in their facades, leaving the emptiness inside. In Roiter’s case, his ruptures illuminate a hidden, metaphysical space behind the canvas. Cardboard or moving boxes (“Yellow Tower”, “Spire”) also frequently appear in his work, sometimes forming crude models of buildings parodying grand, empirical towers such as the Empire State Building and the Kremlin. Architecture is precisely another of his most reiterated themes (“Ivory Tower”), as we must remember that he trained for some years in this discipline. 

From a formal perspective, Andrei Roiter’s work is characterized mainly by his technical mastery and by the austerity that surrounds the forms and the palette, predominantly limited to greens, sepias, reds and browns. These generally earthy, muted colors, underlie the melancholy of the artist, yet there’s a persistent presence of a glowing luminosity. 

The thoughts and feelings Andrei Roiter lays bare in this exhibition, he has pointed out, represent complex universal experiences such as solitude, groundlessness and fragility. The objects in his paintings are symbolic and metaphorical portraits of human aspects, brilliantly executed.

Catalogue
List of works
Andrei Roiter: Open2023-11-20T16:53:06+00:00

Humid Areas: Ariel Cabrera

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.

Catalogue coming soon
Humid Areas: Ariel Cabrera2023-07-27T16:00:16+00:00

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

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.

Catálogo
List of works
CV Antonio Murado
CV Udo Nöger
Three different ways: Udo Nöguer, Antonio Murado, Jesús Guerrero2023-06-20T11:52:04+00:00

Jose Cháfer – Cuerpo y Alma

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.

Catalogue
List of works
Curriculum
Jose Cháfer – Cuerpo y Alma2023-05-19T11:35:28+00:00

BAD 2023

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).

Dossier
BAD 20232023-05-05T15:13:56+00:00

Abstract

ABSTRACT

1 April – 26 May

From the 1st of April to the 26th of May, Alvaro Alcázar is curating the exhibition Abstract at John Holland Gallery in Lepe, Huelva.

The path of abstraction, beyond the canonical European avant-garde of the 20th century, has led artists to express themselves by experimenting different techniques and materials. What this exhibition shows is that there is a multiplicity of ways of approaching the concept of abstraction, some focused on space and light, others on the technique itself, or simply pursuing a particular aesthetic. But beyond formal pretensions, most of the artists in this exhibition endow their works with a deep content, paintings and sculptures that speak to us about their author’s feelings, of his relationship with nature, or of his own existence. 

It is a heterogeneous mix of artists, all represented by the gallery, who work in different disciplines, such as sculpture in the case of David Nash or Nigel Hall, painting on canvas in the case of Rebeca Plana, board for Guillem Nadal, or paper for Cristina Babiloni. We also find heterogeneity in the nationalities of the artists, as the Spanish artists are joined by British artists such as Nash or Hall, or German artists like Wolfgand Flad and Krauskopf. Nor are the different careers of our artists uniform, since authors such as Rafael Canogar, Murado or Edmondson have decades of experience in the Spanish and international art scene, while others such as José Cháfer or Rebeca Plana, or Cristina Babiloni represent the gallery’s firm commitment to emerging art.

Abstract2023-03-31T10:05:33+00:00

David Nash – Recent Works

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.

Catálogo
Listado de obras
David Nash – Recent Works2023-01-25T11:26:43+00:00

ARCO 2023

ARCO 2023

Madrid,  february, 2023

The Álvaro Alcázar gallery participates, once again since its foundation in 2006, at the new edition of the ARCO fair. On this occasion, the proposal revolves around a central work, “The Best Horse in the World”, painted by Eduardo Arroyo in 1965 and which winks at the present day, due to the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II of England. It is an impressing equestrian portrait through which Arroyo enacts, with the great irony that characterizes him, as an old-fashioned court painter, ridiculing who has exercised dominion over the British people. The painter also makes fun of the propagandistic function of art, which has tried to picture political leaders throughout history.

The other pieces exhibited are all based on the tonalities of this main work. This year, the gallery has decided to give special prominence to sculpture, a strong presence category in this exhibition. These works range from small format, as in the case of Kepa Garraza, who has converted in three dimensions one of his famous “demonstrators”, or Mari Puri Hierro, who once again displays the “Blue Bilbao” in a bronze sculpture. Another bronze sculpture is the monumental one by David Nash, one of the most relevant protagonists of British Land Art. The intense red and the verticality of the figure stand out against the horizontality and sinuosity of the work of José Cháfer, who has made for this occasion a unique piece in solid birch wood. Another sculptor, Juan Garaizabal, experiments new techniques in “Fenêtre D’Ainay”, a window fragment inspired by the above-mentioned French château. Lastly, the work of Andreu Alfaro, one of the great sculptors of the second half of the 20th century and precursor of Spanish minimalism, is the finishing touch to the list of artists presented by the gallery in this edition.

Along with the sculptures, the stand is dotted with numerous paintings, mostly in small format.  This year the great new feature is the Cuban painter Ariel Cabrera, whose work can be admired during the monographic exhibition that the gallery is going to dedicate to him at the end of March. Cabrera is joined by another figurative painter, José Luis Serzo, an excellent illustrator, who presents an erotic drawing on a metal plate. Guillem Nadal, usually attached to abstraction, also joins figuration with a panel from his Miralls series, representing a skull. The very opposite happens for Simon Edmondson, who has chosen on this occasion to move his painting to abstraction and opt for an intense chromatic range. Rafael Canogar, meanwhile, presents an acrylic on methacrylate in black and white, typical of the artist’s last period. The color blue is the common feature between the work of the Valencian artist Rebeca Plana and the German Peter Krauskopf, the first by using expressive brushstrokes and the second by focusing on the process and materiality of the painting. Another great artist, Nacho Criado, a pioneer in Spanish conceptual art, makes his particular tribute to Rothko. Finally, two highly acclaimed artists, Luis Canelo and Antonio Murado, focus on organic paintings.

In parallel to the stand, the gallery presents a Solo Project by Cristina Babiloni, whose work centers on the theme of the sea, a clear reference to the theme chosen by ARCO for this year’s edition. For Babiloni, painting is a way of expressing her concern for the degradation of the oceans by human action. The seabed is a constant in his production, as it can be seen in the works presented.

List of Works
Catalogue / Dossier
Solo Project by Cristina Babiloni
ARCO 20232023-03-31T10:54:13+00:00

Kepa Garraza: “Nuevo monumentalismo. We just want to set the world on fire”

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.

Catalogue / Dossier
List of works
Kepa Garraza: “Nuevo monumentalismo. We just want to set the world on fire”2022-11-07T09:09:25+00:00

ESTAMPA 2022

 13th – 16th October 2022

Stand #5C03

Alvaro Alcazar gallery is once again participating in the Estampa Fair, held in Madrid from 13th to 16th October. For this edition, 17 artworks have been selected and will be located at stand #5C03.

Among the artists present are Cristina Babiloni, who through her painting Zale (2020) immerses us in her oceanic world full of life, Peter Krauskopf, with his abstract artwork in which he shows his mastery of light and colour, Guillem Nadal, who makes us follow with the eyes those hypnotic grooves with which he recreates the landscapes of the mind, José Luis Serzo, with a select choice from his series Las Tentaciones de Courbet, Kepa Garraza, who makes us reflect on the representation of the Power in occidental culture, Mari Puri Herrero, who invites us to enter her dreamlike world in which nature predominates, and the british artist Simon Edmondson, with his River Dream (2018-2022), through which, with his expressionist language, he takes us back to a nostalgic past.

There will also be sculptures by the artists Nacho Criado, with his minimalist piece Homenaje a Rothko (1970), José Cháfer with his famous wooden sculptures through which he tries to reach a point of balance and movement, and Juan Garaizabal, with his duo of sculptures À moi (2022) and À toi (2022) in which the different materials mastered by the artist are fused. 

The guest artists are Andrei Roiter, who uses found and discarded objects to create poetic paintings full of meaning, Matthew Benedict, an artist who moves within realist figuration and who on this occasion brings us his iconic Witch Hazel (2007) and, finally, Jorge Barbi, whose sculptural pieces have been conceived through objects found in the countryside.

List of works
Catalogue / Dossier
ESTAMPA 20222022-10-14T09:43:34+00:00

Art on Paper 2022

6th – 9th October

Stand #45

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery participates for the first time in the third edition of the Art on Paper Fair held in Brussels from 6th to 9th October. Located at Stand #45, you will find the 25 main works of this fair. Made in different techniques, all of them on paper.

The gallery’s artists present are Eduardo Arroyo, with his famous work inspired by Carmen Amaya and the episode that took place at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, Rebeca Plana, with a small section of her abstract series representing the 12 months of the year, Kepa Garraza, with his striking images that make us reflect on the representation of power in occidental culture, José Luis Serzo, with his strong symbolic and timeless images, and Ariel Cabrera, who recently joined the gallery’s staff and presents us with scenes in which he mixes History and fiction in 19th century Cuba.

List of works
Catalogue / Dossier
Art on Paper 20222022-10-11T08:32:12+00:00

KIAF SEOUL 2022

2 – 5 of September 2022

Stand# S11

The Alvaro Alcázar Gallery presents in this edition of Kiaf Seoul some works by the artist of the Rafael Canogar Gallery.

The origin of the work exhibited in this fair is to be found in 2020, coinciding with the confinement that the artist spent at his home on the coast of southern Spain. There, with almost no materials, he began to explore with different supports acquired almost randomly over the Internet. One of them was acetate plastic, which resulted in paintings with a one- or two-tone paper base, with a sheet of acetate laid on top, on which the artist traces a more matteric horizontal line. 

This model, created with paper and acetate, he later took it to large format by using methacrylate, where the artist works on the front and back. But this aesthetic also carries a strong symbolic charge, as for him it represents landscapes of sky-earth and earth-air, where the imprint of man is evident through the brushstrokes.

All of Canogar’s work of the last two years follows this same line, showing how the artist, at 86 years of age, has been able to renew himself. The painter, who began his career at the end of the 1950s as a founding member of the Grupo el Paso, returns here to the search for essentiality that moved abstract expressionism and informalism at the time. He has recently emphasised his desire to return to working with minimal elements in order to enhance his radical nature, as he did at the height of the Spanish avant-garde. He thus returns to his origins, closing the circle he began to trace back in the 1950s.

List of works
Catalogue/ Dossier
KIAF SEOUL 20222022-11-07T12:58:10+00:00

Peter Krauskopf “Shadowpieces”

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.

List of works
Catalogue/ Dossier
Peter Krauskopf “Shadowpieces”2024-07-22T08:43:58+00:00

Arte Santander 2022

16 – 20 of  july 2022

Rebeca Plana – A year from Santander

BOOTH# 26

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents in this edition of Arte Santander a series of 12 works made by the artist Rebeca Plana over the last 12 months. The origin of this project dates back to the last edition of the fair, in July 2021, when the artist visited our stand. There it was agreed that she would be the gallery’s bet for the next edition and the project was defined: “A year from Santander”. The artist has produced 12 works, one each month to be presented in July 2022.

This series that we present here responds to this idea. It consists of twelve works made in mixed media on paper that respond to the marked style of the artist. Works where the protagonists, the colour and the line arranged on plain backgrounds reveal numerous emotional perceptions. They are works of a markedly abstract character, sometimes calligraphic, which combine elements of structured composition with a savage and improvisational atmosphere, taking them towards the historical patriarchy of abstract expressionism.

List of works
Catalogue/ Dossier
Arte Santander 20222022-07-15T10:51:51+00:00

BAD + Bordeaux 2022

7 – 10 of July 2022

Booth # R+1 36 Hangar 4

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery participates in the first edition of the BAD + Bordeaux Fair, from 7 to 10 July in Bordeaux. On this occasion, artists represented by the Gallery will be present at Stand R+1 36, combining small and large sizes.

In the sculptural field, Spanish artists such as Jose Cháfer, Mari Puri Herrero and Juan Garaizabal will be in the exhibition. There will also be the painting of the German Peter Krauskopf with his “overpainting” pieces and the great representative of Spanish art Rafael Canogar, with his works on methacrylate.

Finally, there will be two works by Eduardo Arroyo with his unmistakable fly and a painting with his characteristic literary inspiration.

List of works
Catalogue/ Dossier
BAD + Bordeaux 20222022-07-07T09:07:19+00:00

Comunidad – Collective exhibition

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.

Catalogue / Dossier
List of works
Comunidad – Collective exhibition2022-07-15T08:47:02+00:00

Las tentaciones de Courbet by Jose Luis Serzo

José Luis Serzo – ‘Las tentaciones de Courbet’

March 24th – May 21st

From Thursday 24 March, the Alvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the solo exhibition of the artist José Luis Serzo, who is, in the words of the historian Juan Manuel Bonet, “one of the most powerful voices of figuration today”. The exhibition, which includes paintings, sculptures and installations, can be visited until mid-May. 

José Luis Serzo (Albacete 1977) returns with a new series that promises to be one of the most subversive and disturbing of his career. Courbet’s temptations could be the life we do not dare to live: the people we want to merge with or the places we want to go despite the terror of throwing ourselves into the void. José Luís Serzo (Albacete, 1977) uses the painter Gustav Courbet as an excuse to take us to a stage where pleasure, eroticism and guilt dance; a pictorial and sculptural daydream that shows us the world without any qualms or filters. From Courbet’s dreams and fears imagined by Serzo, we are witnesses to a study of eroticism linked to fantasy, long banished from the sex we practice in this omnipantal society. In this exhibition, Serzo studies sexuality lived as a game and approaches the female anatomy with an almost frightening authority; bodies that are landscapes, postures that are the stellar movement of the universe. She fills them with palpitating iconographies, masks of death, flowers, eroticised garlic and a sea of crimson curtains that seem to us like skirts towards the madness of feeling, losing our senses in the process. And so he tells us that to live intensely is also to approach death. 

Lidón Sancho Ribés, art critic and writer. 

Short biography and CV:

José Luis Serzo is a multidisciplinary artist who, through his paintings, drawings, photographs, objects, installations and literature, unifies different topics where the imaginary and the reality take shape in an original way in a mise-en-scène, creating exhibition-stories and allowing to exploit different disciplines. He began his studies of Humanities in Albacete, to later study Art in Toledo, however, he finished his studies in Madrid, where he had several exhibitions from very early on.

Some of his best known series are ‘Post Show’, ‘El fantástico vuelo del hombre cometa’, ‘Thewelcome’, ‘Los sueños de I Ming’ or ‘Los Señores del Bosque’. He has participated in exhibitions in museums, art centres, galleries and fairs around the world, such as in Munich, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Buenos Aires, among others.Serzo has also engage into the world of cinema producing a short film called ‘Archimétrica’, which has won several international awards between 2020 and 2021.

List of pieces

Catalogue of the exhibition

CV

Las tentaciones de Courbet by Jose Luis Serzo2022-03-29T09:40:41+00:00

ARCO 2022 February 23-27

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery is once again participating in the new edition of the ARCO 40+1 Fair, where recent works by several of the gallery’s national artists will be shown, such as Kepa Garraza with his new protest series We just want to set the world on fire, Rebeca Plana and Cristina Babiloni, also with recent work. Another artist from Madrid, Jose Cháfer, represents the sculptural section of the exhibition. In a more material sense, there is a work by Guillem Nadal, included in the series ‘Projecte per a una illa’, a project that is currently on display at the Gallery until the beginning of March. The presence of the work of Mari Puri Herrero in a Solo Project, with her sculptures of Heads in the characteristic “Bilbao Blue”, in an adjoining space, at stand 7A16B, should be highlighted.

Eduardo Arroyo’s imposing work Dichoso Quien como Ulises ha hecho un largo viaje is framed within the framework of the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, coinciding also with the publication of Ulysses illustrated by the artist. Another of the iconic pieces taking part is the sculpture Corkscrew, by Nacho Criado, a leading exponent of Spanish conceptual art in the second half of the 20th century. The presence of Rafael Canogar also stands out with his paintings on methacrylate, in which he investigates for the first time with this material as a support, infusing the works with a strong symbolic charge.

Finally, the international note is provided by Simon Edmondson and a sample of his new series Silver linings.

 

List of works

ARCO 2022 February 23-272022-02-21T10:13:12+00:00

Guillem Nadal – Recent works

GUILLEN NADAL – Recent works

January – March 2022

The Alvaro Alcazar Gallery presents from January 21 the monographic exhibition of the Majorcan artist Guillem Nadal. The exhibition includes a total of sixteen pieces made in recent months, in large and small format, for which the painter has used paper, board and canvas as supports. Guillem Nadal retakes for this exhibition his “Projecte per a una illa”, a series started in 2016 and which is, without a doubt, one of the valued projects within his extensive career. The works exhibited here, like all the project, stand out for their great gesturality, conferred by the artist’s creative process. Nadal works with his hands, plowing the canvas, producing furrows, textures; literally introducing himself into the work. The result is a game of light and shadow that invites not only to see the paintings from different points of view, but also generates in the spectator an inevitable attraction to touch the paintings. Nadal’s characteristic monochromatism, limited to a palette of whites, blacks, and grays, is altered on this occasion by the novel introduction of purple tones, which for the artist are nothing more than part of the process of “sedimentation”, as he defines it, the result of chance in the process of creating the painting. Guillem Nadal’s artistic production includes different series, where the artist projects fragments of himself, different attitudes, or feelings; this is the case of “Miralls” or “El Paisatge de la memòria”, thus constituting his “Projecte per a una illa” a small part of this extensive production.

The works presented here show the artistic maturity of their author, understanding them within the totality of the project and not in solitary. From a formal point of view, Nadal moves in the language of abstraction, creating curved forms, under which underlies the idea of the island. Island as a sentimental journey, as a metaphor for life, as a path that takes you back to the starting point and finally, to the possibility of building your own island. Paradoxically, an island that does not refer to the place where Nadal was born and lives but has much deeper meanings. This is his particular way of joining and reinventing the long tradition of Majorcan landscape painting, which reached its highest peaks in the 40s, the difference is that Nadal, recreates the landscapes of the mind, referring to the poetics of this genre.  

 

List of pieces

Catalogue of works

Guillem Nadal – Recent works2022-01-28T16:57:32+00:00

Arroyo and (some of) his favorite characters

From November 18th to December Alvaro Alcázar gallery presents the solo exhibition “Arroyo and (some of) his favorite characters”. Eduardo Arroyo is one of the most important Spanish artists on the international scene and his painting played a fundamental role in the postwar and later Spanish scene, being the greatest exponent of so-called figurative realism.

Álvaro Alcázar gallery offers its space to give life to the imaginative and vital universe of the painter, through a selection of some of the main characters that obsessed the artist during his long career. The exhibition has been structured around a selection of eight main themes, which has undoubtedly been the most arduous task of the entire project, given the enormous repertoire of hobbies and characters that surrounded the artist’s life. These are: Eduardo with his self-portraits, Tío Pepe, deshollinadores, entre pintores, JMBW, moscas, James Joyce and José Bergamín. Most of these themes derive from his passion for literature, art or lived experiences, which is why they contain numerous readings and metaphors, turning them into authentic painted chronicles. It is therefore a narration of his experiences, dressed in the irony and critical sense that always characterized the work of Eduardo Arroyo.

This exhibition brings together around thirty works, in techniques such as painting, collage, sculpture, drawing, photography or engraving, made by Arroyo from the end of the 50s, until 2018 and therefore, a reflection of the different styles that the artist went through, from a naturalistic language, through pointillism, pop-art and even cubism. This is a unique opportunity to see together some of Eduardo’s most representative works on these topics, including some of them being shown to the public for the first time. This exhibition has carried out together with the collaboration of his family and close friends, who wanted to pay him their particular tribute.

 

List of works

Arroyo and (some of) his favorite characters2021-11-24T16:25:34+00:00

ESTAMPA 21-24 Octubre 2021

From October 21-24th 2021, Álvaro Alcázar Gallery will participate in the next edition of Estampa Art Fair, booth 3B26A.

Among the selection of artists for this edition, we present Guillem Nadal with two recent pieces of his skull series. Cristina Babiloni presents one of his marine materic paintings, which shows her concern for oceans and corals. The German artist Wolfgang Flad presents two spray painted and carved plywoods. Jorge Barbi, through his Cábaco Z, plays with chance and the passing of time through found woods. 

In addition, we present three pieces by the new gallery artist Jose Chafer. In his sculptures, he focuses on the investigation of visual weights, tensions and the multiple ways possible to reach the point of balance and movement.

List of works 

 

ESTAMPA 21-24 Octubre 20212021-11-26T09:53:37+00:00

Rafael Canogar: Origen

Gallery Álvaro Alcázar presents, on occasion of this new edition of Arte Madrid Apertura Origin, an exhibition with the latest works by Rafael Canogar. It is a representative sample of the works painted during lockdown and months afterwards. The paintings have been made on a material hitherto unprecedented in Canogar’s career; methacrylate. 

 

The use of this material conditions the aesthetics of the works exhibited here, which are mostly vertical paintings with one or two color fields applied on the reverse and crossed on the obverse by thick material strokes. The methacrylate transparency allows painting on both sides and, according to the painter, it allows becoming active the empty space between the two surfaces. Canogar also infuses them with a strong symbolic charge, since for him, they represent landscapes of heaven-earth and earth-air, where man’s imprint is evident through the brushstrokes. 

 

Rafael Canogar, who began his career in the late 1950s as a founding member of the Grupo El Paso, takes up again the search for essentiality that moved the abstract expressionism and informalism at that moment. The artist has recently highlighted his willingness to return to working with minimal elements in order to enhance his radicalism, as he did in times of the Spanish avant-garde. Thus, he returns to his Origin, closing the circle that began to trace back in the 50s. 

 

Finally, through this exhibition the painter continues his assertion to recover the role of painting as an essential genre, thanks to its capacity to communicate emotions, exciting us or making us vibrate. For the artist, painting has lost relevance in favor of other genres due to the conception of art as a merely consumer good.

 

Listado de obras

 

3D exhibition *

 

*Thanks to the collaboration of Arte Global, Red Collectors and Idealista.

Rafael Canogar: Origen2021-11-26T09:56:15+00:00

¿Los últimos cuadros que pintó Velazquez? Una propuesta

From 13 May, the Galería Álvaro Alcázar presents the solo exhibition of the British painter Simon Edmondson. It invites us to discover three previously unpublished series in charcoal and oil, which evoke what, according to experts in the field, could be the last works painted by Velázquez, which disappeared in the fire that destroyed the Alcázar in Madrid in 1734. Edmondson recreates here the mythological series documented as having been painted by the genius of the “Siglo de Oro” for the royal site around 1660, while the Prado Museum exhibits Mercury and Argus, the only one to survive the fire.

The royal register of 1686 mentions, along with Mercury and Argos, three paintings depicting the Ovidian myths of Venus and Adonis, Apollo and Marsyas and Psyche and Cupid, although it omits any mention of which moment of the story was depicted. Edmondson has followed the same technical and formal scheme used by Velázquez in Mercury and Argus to illustrate the scenes, using his own creativity to choose the moment and composition and bring them back to life. Moreover, thanks to his study of the actual inventory, the artist has succeeded in reproducing its proportions and its location within the famous “Salón de los Espejos”. The arrangement of the paintings, in the form of a mythological frieze, would be the same as in the royal site, thus transporting us to the palatial atmosphere of the reign of Philip IV.

On the other hand, the exhibition includes around ten works, some recent and others from different stages of the painter’s long artistic career.

¿Los últimos cuadros que pintó Velazquez? Una propuesta2021-05-13T17:17:41+00:00

DE NATURA: la naturaleza en su lugar geométrico

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the exhibition of Luis Canelo and Frank Buschmann, from March 25- April. “DE NATURA: La naturaleza en su lugar geométrico” combines the relationship of both artists with the natural world; Canelo from painting and Buschmann from cabinetmaking.

Luis Canelo delimits the formal scheme of the pictorial surface with lines and geometric planes, that dialogue with the presence of the materials. Frank Buschmann works directly with it, using wood and its multiple possibilities. In the exhibition, Canelo’s microscopic perspective and Buschmann’s macroscopic one combine to give rise to a complete vision of nature.

Catalogue
LIST OF WORKS
LUIS CANELO’S PRESS RELEASE
FRANK BUSCHMANN’S PRESS RELEASE

DE NATURA: la naturaleza en su lugar geométrico2021-04-23T11:30:27+00:00

Visto y No Visto

Alvaro Alcázar Gallery  is pleased to present the group exhibition Visto y no visto on Saturday, February 5. A play on words that seeks to show adaptation to immediate changes. Rethink what we have and improvise. Thus, the exhibition brings together more than twenty works by gallery artists, and invites the spectator to view and review these works, some of them previously exhibited and others shown for the first time here.

The tour begins with the works of Juan Garaizabal and Simon Edmondson, where light is presented as the main element, although treated in two radically different ways. They light our way until we come across some essential paintings and sculptures in Eduardo Arroyo’s work, where he boasts of this characteristic irony.

In this game of mixing and enhancing, the pairing Carlos III by Kepa Garraza with Stanford II by Alejandro Guijarro stands out. The first of an almost realistic figuration that contrasts with the abstraction evident in Guijarro’s erased blackboard.

Following the trail of the black that precedes, the skulls of Guillem Nadal are arranged, works that stand out for the materiality of their technique, very different from that of Rafael Canogar, who provides the note of color with the red line within so much white and black.

Soft and rounded forms constitute the link between the painting of Maru Quiñonero, with the black tondo of Bosco Sodi and, from a sculptural perspective, the work of Nigel Hall, which is presented as an ovals landscape.

On another wall, an impressive painting / tapestry by Antonio Murado from his last period, a descendant of those who were in his recent exhibition.

The explosion of color comes from Rebeca Plana, whose paintings stand out for their fast, energetic and vibrant stroke, while Simon Edmondson creates opposite sensations, inviting us to comfort and warmth through his Chaise Longe.

Catalogue
LIST OF WORKS

Visto y No Visto2021-02-25T12:01:37+00:00

Oceánicas

“Oceánicas”

Cristina Babiloni

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents Oceánicas, the first solo exhibition by Cristina Babiloni as a new artist of the gallery. Oceánicas was created throughout this year, specifically for this space.

Cristina Babiloni’s works plunge us in the deep seabed, creating a unique sensory experience. When observing these works, it is inevitable to detach ourselves, sinking into the deep ocean and letting the sound of water lurk, that particular white noise in which we feel cozy and protected. There is even a forbidden attraction and a need of touching the works.

The tour begins in the darkness of the deep sea, tinged with an intense blue color, which gradually receives the effect of light and modifies the palette towards more typical of the coastal ecosystem tones. Vibrant tones that show the vital wealth and diversity of the oceanic surface.

For Cristina Babiloni, corals are the color of life and with her work, she seeks to raise awareness of the danger in which these super ecosystems are, due to pollution and global warming: “the oceans have become sponges of heat and waste toxic that make corals lose their color, the color of life. These are living beings, colonial animals on which 25% of marine species depend, they protect our coasts from rising sea levels and subsequent soil erosion. This is why through my work, I want to transmit the feeling and concern that I have, in order to raise the viewer awareness of this great threat ”.

CATALOGUE

Oceánicas2021-02-10T12:00:06+00:00

lo azul

“Lo azul”

Maru Quiñonero

Group exhibition

The word Blue, which we recognize and use as a masculine noun or adjective, is enlarged to gather an endless set of meanings. Because infinite can be every person perceptions and distorted personal memories.

Maru Quiñonero

Alvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of Mari Quiñonero as a new gallery artist. “Lo azul” is an exhibition created exclusively for this space, and is emerging as a great personal project. 

The exhibition features twelve works that reveal the evolution of the artist in the creative process of her series “Color and Vacuum”; a work beyond abstraction that focuses on the diversity of shapes and colors. The exhibition displays both, an unpublished text and a series of pictorial works on canvas and paper where the use of color is studied beyond mere plastic expression, opening up a range of possibilities that takes the artist to more moving areas. This journey through the color blue continues in a group exhibition, including artworks by gallery artists such as Mari Puri Herrero, Rafael Canogar, Peter Krauskopf, Rebeca Plana and Guillem Nadal, and also guest artists such as Alejandro Botubol and Jude Castel.

Taken together, both exhibitions highlight as Maru Quiñonero defined, a “merry-go-round of irrefutable blues”, which reveal, indeed, numerous emotional perceptions. Rafael Canogar leaves in his works the trail of the metaphorical and lyrical intensity of the pictorial surface. In “Winter”, the work presented here, blue acquires even greater force as a representation of that season. Peter Krauskopf also manages to give an almost wintery dimension to the blue in his brushstroke of pictorial drag, to the point of making it freezing with those metallic and shiny tones, so similar to ice.

Memories of a city can be also blue. Jude Castel represents in several works made in pen on paper, his vision of Madrid through emblematic monuments or buildings. Blue can also be the memory of water, of sea. For Rebeca Plana it is an approach to the Mediterranean Sea, the same as for Guillem Nadal. Even Alejandro Botubol, gives it a mystical character, as his his blue manages to illuminate itself. Finally, in the middle of the room we find a monumental sculpture by Mari Puri Herrero “Reading head” in that color that she defines as “Bilbao blue” and which shows how comfortable she feels painting with it. According to the artist, blue tends to expand better and how can it not, if it is the color of the sky, of the water. It is a color that allows you to feel free in movement.

Ultimately with these two exhibitions, perhaps we will be able to expand our own ideas and emotions regarding this color. Perhaps we will even be able, as Mari Puri says, to make us not feel confined with blue.

CATÁLOGO
“LO AZUL” por MARI QUIÑONERO

lo azul2020-12-28T10:36:18+00:00

Nacho Criado

Nacho Criado “Dieci anni dopo”

“I consider it fundamental to reclaim great figures of art, to revalue and give them the importance they deserve. I am proud to present this exhibition and to recall Nacho Criado as the great artist he was, one of the most significant to understand the art of the second half of the 20th century”

Álvaro Alcázar Gamarra

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the death of the artist Nacho Criado, Alvaro Alcázar Gallery presents a tribute exhibition, with a review of sixteen works produced between 1970 and 2008. This exhibition seeks to reflect the dynamics in the creation of his most emblematic works during the period that he worked with Carmen Gamarra and later with Álvaro Alcázar in different spaces.

Taken together, the exhibition shows Criado’s inspiration in international art trends such as minimalism, conceptual art and arte povera. However, Nacho Criado did not cling to a particular style but opened up instead his artistic boundaries. In fact, although he was considered one of the first proponents of conceptual art in Spain, he refused to declare himself a pioneer artist since his works, although complex and difficult, according to him, were developed from traditional works.

The exhibition route reveals a journey through the artist’s years of creation and is physically supported by two works: The Alpine Wound, representing a camel located in a superfluous, disoriented and lost environment and, despite its effort, weak and agonising, ends up dying in the attempt to reach the Mother Mountain. This sculpture is a metaphor of the camel’s journey. Both works lead us through space and despite being separated, they end up becoming, magically, just one.

Between these two works we find also on display monumental sculpture such as Desprendimiento de Cúpula, a work that shows the artist’s fascination with the concept of architecture as a failure of spaces, and in which Criado denotes the fragility of any conceptual construction.

It is also worth to highlight other works from different remarkable series within his artistic career, such as Homenaje a  Rothko, which represents the crisis of the traditional object. In this work the artist takes up again his sculptural facet throughout simple cardboard cut-outs, converting the hollow and the slight marks of colour into an evocation of the old materiality.

The series A partir de Matthias Grünewald as well as the monumental installation of the same title, along with the work on paper entitled A partir de Matthias Grünewald II, announce the characteristic sense of conceptual representation through the lightness of Nacho Criado’s geometric figures. The lines are cornered and tortured by their own geometry and the limit of the painting itself. The bodies, which in the original work are shown explicitly tortured, have disappeared, only remains the oblivion of their figures enclosed in transversal lines. 

He also produced on paper works as Domus Omnia or Gran Paisaje Convulso, which reflects an internal conversation about oneself own path, which ends up lining up and creating a mountainous landscape. The geographical reconstruction of what was experienced is ed in a fine and trembling layout with ups and downs

Finally, we would like to emphasize Dieci Anni dopo, which gives the name to the exhibition and reflects a more intimate aspect of Nacho Criado.

EXPOSICIÓN 3D
CATÁLOGO

Nacho Criado2020-12-31T12:41:37+00:00

Rebeca Plana y Alejandro Guijarro

Rebeca Plana: Begin the Beguine

Alejandro Guijarro: 36 Views from Within

Begin the Beguine is Rebeca Plana’s first exhibition as a represented artist in Álvaro Alcázar gallery. Ten new, large-format works and realized in the previous months exclusively for this show, are display representing a shared desire: to start again.

The 195 x 162 cm paintings reveal the fluid and fast gestural imprint that characterizes the artist, whose practice is highly direct and fresh. These works are made on linen, a completely new medium for the artist, who, despite considering it complex, admits that it “has a lot of presence” and confirms her interest and curiosity in the use of different materials.

Her practice highlights the diversity of colors and their importance in transmitting numerous sensations. They work as a reflection of the inputs that the artist receives on a daily basis. She reuses, almost as a let motiv, the color green for example, is a color which makes her feel comfortable and consideres it as a reflection o a “wonderful magic”.She also uses the fluorescent orange that, according to her, puts in a latent way and provides that light which is much needed today in contrast to other more stormy colors.

Rebeca Plana should be addressed as an in-formalist artist and her paintings are a reflection of her passionate and rapturous character. She considers that her own essence is painting, therefore she paints because she has to paint and she can do it from the needle but it always has to be in calm conditions: “I like to say that I paint from the stomach and not from the heart , because the anger comes out of your guts, even if you are learning to control it”.

In this period of wide uncertainty, each one focuses on their ability and Rebeca Plana knows how to paint and express her feelings. She starts again.

The photographer Alejandro Guijarro, for his exhibition in Álvaro Alcázar gallery, displays 36 images where photography is shown at its intersection with other media such as painting or print. His creative process reveals a technique closely related to surrealist painting: decalcomania.

This technique, so widely used by artists such as Óscar Domínguez or Max Ernst, among others, is known as one of the so-called mechanical or automatic painting processes. Using a now obsolete type of instant film and its chemicals process such as pigments, Alejandro Guijarro brings this technique to the field of photography, blurring the line between the real and the fictitious, between the tangible and the imagined: “this work establishes a fictitious space. From my study, I document the world with my eyes closed”.

The artist breaks the limits of the photographic image and creates a fragmented relationship between the object and its representation. Thus reality and his visual experience are further questioned. In this way, the artist manages to create a series of landscapes that honor Katsushika Hokusai and his 36 views of Mount Fuji. He considers it an interior journey through landscapes that have a geographical reference and invites us as spectators to create our own journey.

CATALOGUE
PRESS DOSSIER REBECA PLANA
PRESS DOSSIER ALEJANDRO GUIJARRO

Rebeca Plana y Alejandro Guijarro2020-06-26T11:42:34+00:00

Kepa Garraza and Bosco Sodi

Kepa Garraza: Propaganda

Bosco Sodi: Cuatro grandes alegorías

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents two solo exhibitions, Kepa Garraza and Bosco Sodi from February 25 to April 11, 2020.

In Propaganda, Kepa Garraza presents ten of his most recent works and reflects on the nature of the images we consume daily. This exhibition is presented as a series of drawings through which the artist wants to analyze the representation of power throughout history. In order to achieve this, he has used a serie of images that have been used as political, military or revolutionary propaganda from ancient Greece to the present day. The selection of these images responds to personal preferences and a very specific way of reading and interpreting the story. This project has, therefore, the intention of reflecting on the way in which power has been represented throughout the centuries, as well as showing the fundamental role that art has played in this process. The history of art has, therefore, a key importance in the development of this project, since a good part of the images that Kepa Garraza has used as references to make these drawings correspond to paintings and sculptures that throughout the centuries have been used as a political tool. Photography and cinema are obviously two other sources of powerful inspiration, especially for those works that refer to events that occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries. His intention with these works is none other than to reflect on the role of art within our society and highlight something that is not new: the political and social dimension of art and its inevitable influence on the development and narration of history.

Bosco Sodi presents four of his most recent works, made ad hoc for the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery space. Four great allegories (Homage to Goya) is an exhibition in which the artist wanted to make a particular nod to the set of four tondos, made by Goya commissioned by Manuel Godoy at the beginning of the 19th century, initially known as the four allegories. Goya had painted these four tondos to express the ideals of the Enlightenment and Sodi reinterprets them creating four works that explore the areas in which nature and humanity combine and look for the beauty implicit in destruction.

Sodi focuses in the symbolism of the color black treating it in its purest definition: the absence of light. As Goya was able to perceive it at a certain moment in Illustrated Spain, light is reason and does not exist without darkness. It is the shadow that reveals the lack of lucidity, it is “the dream of reason that produces monsters”. Sodi resembles that lack of light to that non-use of reason and stops at the drama generated by the shadow. As a contemporary artist, he recreates himself in the materiality of the painting, giving rise to an almost organic appearance that highlights even more, if he can, the color black. Perhaps the artist is inviting us to reflect on the darkness that sometimes plunges us as a society into a well of irrationality. In this work, Sodi not only dyes Goya’s work black, but also destroys the regularity of the format of those four works. Its four interpretations are circular, yes, but they are not the same size and thus create an emotional imbalance typical of desolation. What allegory would each work represent, and what would have grown or waned in our contemporary era? It is up to us to reflect on the current weight in our society of Commerce, Industry, Agriculture and Science.

Kepa Garraza and Bosco Sodi2020-04-17T17:38:57+00:00

Mi Casa

Mi casa (My home)

Virtual collective exhibition

From 17th of March 2020

From the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery, we want to launch a project focused on underlining the importance of staying home these days. There is no need to go out unless it is essential and it is absolutely necessary to limit contacts to end this pandemic. 

For this, we invite all artists to send us photographs and details of works related to the house, the home, no matter the support or size, the important thing is to emphasize the idea of staying at home. We will be publishing all the works that are arrriving under the hashtags already known as #myhome #stayhome, #istayathome and also these specifics of the project #whithartistayathome and #arthouse The works that we like the most we will also share on social networks and on our website. 

This will end and when it does, we will make an exhibition. A sample that will be seen in a happy time, after a critic one, that will unite us and make us more responsible, more empathetic and more supportive. Whether you are an artist or not, we ask you to spread it, to think and to let some artist who wants to participate know, we are going to make this project of all of them.

Catalogue 1

Mi Casa2020-05-13T09:38:26+00:00

ARCO 2020

Stand 7C03

En esta edición de ARCOMadrid, la Galería Álvaro Alcázar ha decidido presentar un Stand cuyo tema principal es el tiempo. El lema de ARCO de este año es: It’s a matter of time y nosotros hemos querido aferrarnos a esa idea.

Por un lado, hemos pensado en presentar las obras más inéditas de nuestros artistas reflejando así el tiempo como evolución artística. Tendremos obras inéditas de Eduardo Arroyo, cuya obra es una de las últimas que ha pintado, Antonio Murado, Peter Krauskopf, Mari Puri Herrero y Simon Edmonson. También presentaremos dos obras de Kepa Garraza y Bosco Sodi que reflejan la exposición que tendremos en la Galería durante ARCO. Incluso presentamos en primicia una de las últimas obras de Rafael Canogar como representación de sus últimos trabajos realizados sobre metacrilato. 

Por otro lado, hemos pensado en el tiempo finito que nos acecha diariamente con la crisis del cambio climático. Una de las entradas al stand tiene una torre de reloj escultura monumental realizada por Juan Garaizabal que nos recuerda como nos estamos quedando sin tiempo y es necesario intervenir. Entrar por esa puerta nos permite visualizar un conjunto de obras que rodean una instalación del artista Miguel Sbastida que revela las arqueologías climáticas. Todo esto acompañado de obras de artistas tan naturalistas y orgánicas como las de Guillem Nadal, Luis Canelo y Cristina Babiloni. En el centro de nuestro Stand encontraremos una mesa de centro y dos sillas de nogal americano realizadas por Franck Buschmann Bella.

VER CATÁLOGO

ARCO 20202021-11-25T09:52:41+00:00

Mari Puri Herrero y Miguel Sbastida

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.

Mari Puri Herrero y Miguel Sbastida2020-02-10T17:52:24+00:00

Mari Puri Herrero y Miguel Sbastida

Mari Puri Herrero: Al salir, cierra la puerta

Miguel Sbastida: Arqueologías climáticas

La Galería Álvaro Alcázar inaugura dos exposiciones individuales de Mari Puri Herrero y de Miguel Sbastida en las que se analiza el papel de la naturaleza con procesos creativos y estéticos diferentes que dialogan entre sí.

En Al salir, cierra la puerta, Mari Puri Herrero nos muestra su trabajo más reciente. Trece obras que nos introducen en la intimidad de su proceso creativo donde la introspección son fundamentales. Surge así una mirada profunda de la propia artista a la hora de revisar su propia evolución artística. 

A lo largo de la exposición vemos cómo la artista no se detiene tanto en una temática discursiva literaria sino que decide ahondar en los temas mediante el estudio de las luces, los colores y las sombras. Surgen así diversos temas relacionados con la naturaleza como el de la noche que se concibe como cimiento donde el contraste entre los puntos de luz y los azules profundos. 

Surge un interés por la idea del movimiento continuo en la naturaleza. Ésta se desata y su brusquedad puede llegar a crear figuras espectrales. Un buen ejemplo de esta virulencia, es el tríptico “Conversación”, creado ad hoc para la Galería Álvaro Alcázar, donde vemos ese enramado y movimiento de los árboles producido por el viento que acaba moldeando dos figuras de aire onírico, evocando a un recuerdo. 

Una constante importante en la obra de Mari Puri Herrero es su interés por las artes orientales. A lo largo de los años ha reflexionado y trabajado mucho en torno a el especial enlace que hay en ellas entre el dibujo y la pintura. Su obra se ha visto influenciada por este interés, sus trazos en ocasiones de apariencia brusca comulgan con la delicadeza de figuras casi etéreas. 

En esta exposición Mari Puri Herrero finalmente nos abre la puerta a su particular mundo donde su principal leimotiv serán esas figuras casi espectrales presentadas con un movimiento tan característico y vital. 

Arqueologías Climáticas es la primera exposición individual de Miguel Sbastida en el espacio de la Galería Álvaro Alcázar, que reúne una selección de obras realizadas entre 2017 y 2019 en torno a una línea de investigación centrada en los procesos del desmoronamiento medioambiental y las ecologías del hielo; en la que el artista madrileño lleva trabajando desde 2012. 

La muestra presenta tres proyectos interconectados a través de los que plantea una mirada y reconstrucción de los procesos del cambio climático a partir del hielo glaciar como artefacto arqueológico; invitando a reflexionar sobre conceptos de ausencia, inestabilidad, temporalidad y fragilidad. 

La instalación de esculturas formadas por esqueletos de acero de formas y volúmenes fluidos, For as Long as Possible (Chicago, 2017) se inspira en los Glaciares de los Alpes Suizos, los  cuales son cada año cubiertos por telas térmicas blancas en un esfuerzo fútil de frenar la pérdida acelerada de sus cuerpos helados. Slow Violence (Islandia, 2018) deja paso al glaciar como entidad capaz de narrar su propia desaparición a través de una intervención llevada a cabo en un glaciar Islandés, en la que un conjunto de hojas de papel son marcadas por el incesante goteo  procedente del deshielo. El hilo conductor de la exposición se desarrolla en torno a la instalación Archaeologies of Climate (Madrid, 2017-2019, realizada con el apoyo de la Comunidad de Madrid y La Real Fábrica de Cristales de la Granja); compuesta por un conjunto de columnas de cristal realizadas a partir de patrones de depósito glaciar, que toma como punto de partida la práctica de perforaciones de masas heladas y la obtención de núcleos de hielo como artefactos a través de los que se puede estudiar y reconstruir la arquitectura climatológica de la Tierra.

VER CATÁLOGO

Mari Puri Herrero y Miguel Sbastida2021-04-15T09:15:57+00:00

En Paralelo: A day is a day

The Gallery presents the second edition of its project In Parallel entitled A day is a day. For this exhibition the Gallery has designed a calendar of the year 2020 in which the artists of the Gallery and guests have made a work with free technique and theme. It is an exhibition in which the only homogeneous element, the calendar, will be surrounded by different styles, themes, techniques, showing the aesthetic diversity of current art.

We would like to thank the forty-six artists who have made this exhibition possible whose benefits will go, in part, to the Pablo Hortsman Foundation in the section of the Belén Jordana maternal care unit (Ethiopia):

María Acuyo, Anuca Aísa, Nacho Alcázar, Ángel Alen, Eduardo Arroyo, Cristina Babiloni, Luis Canelo, Rafael Canogar, Carla Cascales Alimbau, Pedro Castrortega, Félix de la Concha, Simon Edmondson, Abel Fernandes, Hugo Fontela, Jorge Galindo, Kepa Garraza , Norberto Gil, Miguel Gómez Losada, Reyes Abad, Macarena Gross, Mari Puri Herrero, Paz Juristo, Peter Krauskopf, Cristina Lama, Miki Leal, Francisco Leiro, Lluis Lleó, Berta Llonch, Sergio de Luz, Rafael Macarrón, Eduardo Martín del Pozo , Felicidad Moreno, Antonio Murado, Guillem Nada, Miguel Nuñez, Rebeca Plana, Mari Quiñonero, David Rodriguez Caballero, Inés San Miguel, Mónica Sánchez Robles, Matías Sánchez, Miguel Sbastida, Julien Spiewak, Isabel Valdecasas, Nuria Vidal, Javier Viver.

En Paralelo: A day is a day2019-12-27T17:50:22+00:00

Intramuros

Intramuros

Antonio Murado

“In this exhibition I present two recent work groups that show a clear relationship with the interior and domestic space.
Large-format paintings were painted outdoors and remained exposed to the elements for weeks in the forest. They are inspired by animal skins and presented as if they were tapestries, without their racks. Le Corbusier called tapestries “nomadic murals”, is that idea of ​​mobility, adaptation and creation of a space or shelter that inspires them.
The second group of paintings, has its origin in the intersection of the painting and the human body through furniture, specifically armchairs and armchairs of the eighteenth century. They are works that represent the window frames that are deformed resulting in the introduction of curves and asymmetric sides. The sides of the racks that normally go unnoticed because nobody stops to look at them frontally, take on greater prominence in these works. I built them thoroughly with noble wood marquetry to underline their object and unique condition. ”

Antonio Murado
November 2019

Intramuros2019-11-06T17:51:34+00:00

En Paralelo

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents a new project entitled En Paralelo. In this season, the Gallery will present among the general exhibitions, short duration shows which invited artist and artist from the Gallery. An opportunity to get closer to more intimate pieces that are part of the Gallery’s warehouse and discover new artist.

In this first edition we can find numerous young artist such as Mari Quiñonero, Miguel Gómez Losada, Isabel Valdecasas, Marcelo Burgos, Jaime Castillo, Maria Acuyo and Ángel Alén. Their works are the core of this exhibition´s approach: creating a formal and thematic dialogue between them and the works of the artist of the Gallery: Eduardo Arroyo, Nigel Hall, Guillem Nadal, Rafael Canogar, Mari Puri Herrero, Peter Krauskopf and Kepa Garraza.

En Paralelo2019-10-25T16:33:40+00:00

APERTURA 2019

APERTURA 2019

Werner Mannaers The Cherry Creek Stories

Juan Garaizabal En la Memoria

First presentation in a Gallery, here in Madrid of the prestigious artist Werner Mannaers: 

“One reason I still paint is because of the never-ending challenge of the orthodoxy of Modernism itself. My recent paintings flowed out of me in the most natural way, as though I couldn’t finish them quickly enough, maybe because I had found a new “alphabet,” as if some sort of psychological floodgates had been opened.

Art is a mirror. It is inevitably about falseness. My art is whimsical, offhand, not serious, but at the same time deadly sincere. I’m a painter always ambitiously courting failure, but fighting for perfection in every sense of the word, attempting to transform the conventional into the visionary.

My work is restless, teasing, and self-deprecatory. It mines and undermines art history.”

For APERTURA 2019 the artist Juan Garaizabal has created a set of sculptures made specially for the new space of the Gallery. Following his concept of Urban Memories, he designed  several columns that recall the late city of Palmira.

Juan Garaizabal starts his projects with illustrations that recreate what no longer exists and serve as a model to give shape with materials such as concrete and steel. These create a dialogue between the object and emptiness. Therefor the spirituality of the place is visually represented.

.

VER CATÁLOGO

APERTURA 20192019-10-17T10:34:20+00:00

PhotoEspaña19

FestivalOff PhotoESPAÑA 2019

Tree, TREE…

Myoung Ho Lee

A grove of trees from a point of view

Juan Millás

LO QUE HAS LEÍDO, ERES

ANUCA AÍSA Y PAZ JURISTO 

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents three exhibitions that reveal different points of view and a personal conception of nature and urban spaces by means of photography. This is a project that seeks to create a dialogue between artists who deal with apparently different topics but who actually have a relationship between them: the contemporary aesthetics gaze.

Thanks to a collaboration between the Spanish Korean Cultural Centre in Madrid and the Hyundai Gallery from Seoul, the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the singular work of the south Korean artist Myoung Ho Lee. In this exhibition the artist brings up to us some unusual questions about the representation of reality, art and environment in his series Tree, Tree…. His photographies show a simple concept through a complex realisation: the trees are shown in his natural context but separated superficially by a white cloth that frames them and, at the same time, taking them out of their context. Thereby, the artist separates the subjects from their original circumstances to reflect on the difference between subject and image. A new representation of nature is built and reveals an optical illusion that is ultimately the artwork within the artwork that encourages us to analyze the image and delve into our way of looking.

On the other hand, Juan Millás sets in his series A grove of trees from a point of view, a study of nature that seeks to achieve a sight, nowadays utopian, of those who contemplated a landscape for the first time in nature. In this way, he also makes a study of our gaze revealing a proposal, imagined, about the origin of the landscape. In the words of the artist himself:

A few years ago I wanted to make a documentary project about ‘the walk’ in the purest style of the writer Robert Walser. I wanted to practice the art of getting lost with the camera in a forest. That intention was transformed into a work about the landscape, also about photography, understood both (the perception of the landscape and the photographic gaze) as hallucinations caused by the crossing, “at an infinite speed” (Jean-Marc Besse), between the world and thought. The vehicle I found to move from one universe to another was the menhir. The architect Francesco Careri, author of Walkscapes: walking as an aesthetic practice (Gustavo Gili, 2002), describes the prehistoric monolith as an object that “contains in itself architecture, sculpture and landscape”. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it is a body interposed between nature and culture. It is territory because before standing up it lacked of symbolic connotations. But the menhir is also order, composition, representation. By rotating it, the human being transforms the stone into something else: strangeness, dream, story. I went into the woods, north of the French region of Brittany, imagining that it would still be possible to distinguish the contour of that differentiation. Pursued the utopian vision of those who contemplated for the first time a landscape in nature.”

Finally, the series Lo que has leído, eres by Paz Juristo and Anuca Aísa reflects the most personal section of this project. The artists honour Francisco Calvo Serraller creating a tour of all the countries described in the literature that they read with him, thus closing a journey that, as a whole, rethinks the gaze. Each photo represents the following sentences:

VIEW CATALOGUE

PhotoEspaña192019-09-28T12:04:46+00:00

Sprezzatura Simon Edmonson

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the biggest project of Simon Edmondson. From 2007 he is being studying the more intimate aspects of the paintings made by Diego Velázquez.  His studies of the painter of the painters is showed on canvas, on paper and on four monumental canvas with same dimension as “Las Meninas”, 318 x 276 cm, that are the centre of the whole exhibition. 

This Edmondson’s long and demanding artistic incursion has consisted in reconsidering the most personal painting by the brilliant master an also the ideological core of the Prado Museum and seed of the current awareness about Painting. This reconsideration is made with the purpose of bringing to light the expressive density of the artwork, today buried because of the enormous quantity of theoretical speculations.

That task has entailed the deploying of this Edmondson’s strict and improbable creative process based on the material standards and techniques managed by Velázquez in 1656, as on the existing historical documentation, assimilating the genius’s plastic solutions as far as arriving to the background of the painting, which, based on the British author, was a noble intention: portray the human existence of this palace’s group.

The Italian term used to title this spectacular exhibition, Sprezzatura, was used by ancient artistic culture to relate the energy and skills which with the great painters execute the most complex figurative scenarios. In this way, Edmondson reveal us that this is the current strength of the contemporary painting: his capacity to provide with life, with energy, in conclusion, with humanity, the reinterpretations of the world. The irreductible mysterious of Art resides in the way the creator poses the brushstrokes on the support.

VIEW CATALOGUE

Sprezzatura Simon Edmonson2019-09-28T11:59:33+00:00

Nero

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents the third edition of the exhibition Una Colectiva. The show  untitled Nero, brings together eight artists with selected pieces that have a common denominator: the color black. From the Gallery we pretend to admire this color, living behind the negativity  of this  concept  so ingrained in the Occidental culture. 

In the work of the Japanese ceramist Toshio Matsui beauty resides in the reflections of the absence of light and emphasizes in the idea of ​​depth thanks to the technique used. The patina of time and using showed in its ceramics along with those of Philippe Barde, contributes to exalt the beauty of the shadow.

In Occident we can see how the absence of color is more and more conceived as something beautiful. The emptiness as a concept creates a contrast between sculptures and context and it gives elegance as we can see in the pieces of Nigel Hall, Jaime Castillo. Other artists like Rafael Canogar and David Nash work with sobriety in order to praise the shadow over shadow. Therefor they create beautiful textures with a superposition of different layers of black.

Finally, we can not forget the idea of black as power. On the one hand, Kepa Garraza gives even more power to fierce historical figures, represented hieratically, by the use of darkness, making the spectator feel fragile and human. On the other hand, Eduardo Arroyo’s work empowers and gives elegance to nearby characters that normally go unnoticed, such as the chimney sweep.

VIEW CATALOGUE

Nero2019-09-28T11:52:05+00:00

Esculturas Nigel Hall

Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents a new solo exhibition by Nigel Hall, one of the most distinguished sculptors in England. 

The exhibition includes twelve sculptures made between 1995 and 2018 displaying the development of the artist’s practice. This exhibition shows the development of Hall’s focus on exploring three-dimensional space, mass and line. It shows the importance of the void as an essential factor for the artist to start creating more linear sculptures with a bigger emphasis on their geometry. 

As Hall says: ‘My work has always revolved around space. I am fascinated by the way in which geometry can be perceived in the landscape.’ Through this the sculptures are subtly incorporated into a space while maintaining the play of light and shadow characteristic to his sculptures. The works almost evoke lightness, regardless of the material used, and bestow elegance upon the environment they are placed in.

VIEW CATALOGUE

Esculturas Nigel Hall2019-09-28T11:29:36+00:00

Una Colectiva, Arantza Pardo y Philippe Barde

The Álvaro Alcázar Gallery presents a collective exhibition in which it invites us to interpret a dialogue between the solidity of the Philippe Barde pieces and the incorporation of those of Arantza Pardo.

On the one hand, the ethereal world in which the large-format canvases of Pardo wrap us almost hit us with a light and a vertiginous movement in which each painting is a new experiment where reconfigures the scientific imaginary. The Unknown series allows to grant an aesthetic solution to the invisible cosmic landscape, although the final result does not represent a real appearance, since the unknown cannot be represented. It provides, thus, an experimental opportunity to challenge assumptions and spiritual perspectives.

On the other hand, the resounding pieces of Barde lead us to reconnect with the terrestrial by means of materials of pure essence of the earth, such as magnesium or the mud itself. In this exhibition we can see their Yakuza woods, created from the combination of different wooden molds; three Stonewear that are a clear example of the terrestrial purity obtained from the magnesium of Mont Blanc; finally with All the same we can see the potter’s game when using the same mold to create different faces.

VIEW CATALOGUE

Una Colectiva, Arantza Pardo y Philippe Barde2019-09-28T11:52:50+00:00

Code of Color of Peter Krauskopf

The Alvaro Alcázar Gallery opens its new space with an exhibition that presents the most recent works by Peter Krauskopf. Code of color is a show in which color is the protagonist. The title refers not only to what is seen on the surface, but also to what lies underneath.When talking about his work, Peter Krauskopf invariably mentions destruction as a fundamental part of the creation. He composes his works in layers reminiscent of pentimenti until he reaches a point where surfaces become textures and structures of interlaced lines and bars. The visual appeal lies in the duality of the physical mixture of colors and the rejection of pictorial volume. The artistic strategy of Peter Krauskopf does not aim at perfection. On the contrary, he seems to be more interested in the systematic errors present in the algorithm of his production process.

Color is the principal element. The artist chooses the most attractive ones and merges the matt and the glossy to arrive at his own interpretation of light. Color also reveals the strong connection that exists between his paintings and works on paper. The papers are born from the excess color of the paintings, showing what the artist did during the day. By sharing these visual diaries, Peter Krauskopf lets us participate in his enigmatic creative process.

VIEW CATALOGUE

Code of Color of Peter Krauskopf2019-09-28T10:50:40+00:00

Una colectiva

From December 13, 2018 to February 9, 2019

A gallery is defined by the works it exhibits. The artists make the gallery and the gallery connects the public with the artists.

Since the opening of the Álvaro Alcázar Gallery in 2006, several national and international creators have set up a common project that has taken shape in different spaces. Now they continue this trip in a new headquarters, located in Ferrer del Río 5 street in Madrid.

On the occasion of the inauguration of this new space, the Álvaro Alcazar Gallery shows the most recent works of its artists: Luis Canelo, Rafael Canogar, Anthony Caro, Simon Edmondson, Juan Garaizabal, Kepa Garraza, Nigel Hall, Mari Puri Herrero, Antonio Murado , Guillem Nadal, David Nash, Miguel Sbastida and Bosco Sodi.

VIEW CATALOGUE

Una colectiva2019-09-28T10:24:51+00:00

Japanese Ceramics

A Japanese Ceramic Exhibition, why?

May be since Ceramics are a major art in Japan.

And why Madrid?

May be because it’s the 150 anniversary of the relationship between Japan and Spain.

May be because my lifetime took me to the country of the rising sun to meet its great artists, sharing with my friend Álvaro Alcázar our interest in art.

Surely because every morning we may reinvent ourselves with a new adventure.

Our life is dual. An exchange between countries, Orient and Occident, Japan and Spain, a reciprocal friendship shared between two artists Philippe Barde and Toshio Matsui, incited us to show these new Japanese ceramics to Madrid.

Ceramics are earth and fire, ancient and primitive but in Asia and of course in Japan, they are the mirror of a culture.

Each clay belongs to a specific place which has its telluric history: its geology, its properties, its qualities and different malleability.

Fire, burning sometimes for a week is a force like an earthquake or a volcano but always part of everyday life . As one opens the kiln there is always doubt: how did the stoneware react, how did the ashes burn the piece and reveal new colours, what dissolved under the heat.

Ceramics are vital, physical and mental. In Japan, people accept to live with natural elements and allow themselves be annihilated by universal force. There is always an acceptance without rebellion of the environment as part of the universe.

In this art, the ceramist, despite his knowledge, his technic and experience, is always at the mercy of fire, water and clay… Every piece displayed today is a victory.

This art is a philosophy, the representation of a way of life. . It expresses the meaning of religion (Zen) through the tea ceremony which also lends beauty to the everyday. The object and its use participate in an aesthetic act. Each piece fulfils its function as it evolves… Actually chawans or tea bowls are not always fit for a ceremony. But this research, both material and intellectual is a modern display governed by qualitative norms inherited from a long tradition.

Its beauty is imperfect, never symmetric, resulting in the representation of an uneven and magnificent world.

Contemporary ceramics are representations of the world, combining to reveal a duel or a challenge with universal energy: Earth- Fire- Man.

This exhibition is an exploration, demonstrating how two well-known ceramists artists Philippe Barde and Toshio Matsui, both University professors collaborated in many projects throughout their life.

One comes from the Occident, Switzerland, the other from the Orient, Japan.

But both share the same love of clay, the pure essence of our earth, with the same tradition, culture and magnanimous will to reach the limits of their investigation.

Their fabulous complicity incited them t found the PT Project where they intermingled and shared works for over 20 years. They represent the duality: Orient and Occident, an intellectual and technical union focusing on the same search. It is a friendship beyond self interest, creating and sharing pieces, in unison.

— Caroline Caffin.

VIEW CATALOGUE

Japanese Ceramics2018-10-17T17:37:23+00:00

Freedom Sculptures

As in previous editions, HayFestival in Segovia dedicates in Félix Ortiz’s orchard-garden in San Marcos neighborhood a special space to sculpture. From September 22, an exhibition will show the works of the artist Juan Garaizabal. 

The display shows twelve sculptures that recover missing several architectural elements from different cities such as Berlin, Venice, Seoul, etc. The works maintain an harmonious relationship with the context in which they are located; although they are all monumental, they perfectly match the landscape of this particular and unique garden. It is worth highlighting the materials Garaizabal used for the sculptures, such as steel, brick, wood and concrete, that allow the artist to explore techniques such as forging, carpentry, electricity and masonry, highlighting him as an eclectic sculptor.

Thanks to this exhibition, there is also a dialogue with the artist’s most recent work, La Puerta de San Martín, which is also shown in the Hay Festival and which becomes part of his already well-known Memorias Urbanas.

VER CATÁLOGO

Freedom Sculptures2021-01-04T17:54:57+00:00

CORPS DE STYLE

En el marco del festival OFF de la vigésimo primera edición de PHotoEspaña, la Galería Alvaro Alcázar presenta, por primera vez en nuestro país, la exposición Corps de style del fotógrafo francés Julien Spiewak. Desde el año 2005 el artista ha estado desarrollando la serie Corps de style en interiores de museos y colecciones privadas de Francia y el extranjero. Se podrán ver catorce fotografías y doce estudios de esta serie en la que elabora un inventario preciso, con detalle, donde diversas partes del cuerpo quedan integradas en las decoraciones. Así, existe en el enfoque del artista esta combinación entre el proyecto y la realización, entre el modelo y la decoración. Además, otorga una brizna de fantasía a su obra para configurar un universo fotográfico propio.

VER CATÁLOGO

CORPS DE STYLE2018-05-04T18:10:25+00:00

UNA TREGUA

La Galería Alvaro Alcázar invita a la reflexión con Una tregua, una exposición colectiva que reúne a ochoa rtistas nacionales e internacionales: Eduardo Arroyo, Simon Edmondson, Kepa Garraza, Nigel Hall, Peter Krauskopf, Antonio Murado, Guillem Nadal y Udo Nöger.
En un período acelerado en el que priman la inmediatez y el bullicio, las obras presentes en esta muestra versan sobre la importancia del sosiego y la quietud tanto en la vida como en el arte. Para que las ideas se desarrollen deben reposar en un lugar metafórico donde no sólo tiene cabida la producción, sino también la meditación.
Así, los momentos de calma son necesarios para retomar cualquier actividad. A través de diferentes géneros, técnicas, temáticas y estilos los artistas de Una tregua proponen espacios físicos o mentales para encontrar el descanso o el silencio y evidencian que para moverse con fuerza es imprescindible parar.

VER CATÁLOGO

UNA TREGUA2018-04-19T12:23:40+00:00

GUILLEM NADAL

“Somos los bárbaros de nuestro hábitat” (Lengua de tierra, Iván de la Nuez).

La Galería Alvaro Alcázar presenta la exposición individual Guillem Nadal. Obras recientes, en la que reúne los últimos trabajos plásticos del artista mallorquín. En su exploración constante, Nadal propone cartografías sin principio ni fin que sitúan al espectador frente al abismo. El viaje es el hilo conductor de estas piezas que originan lugares experimentales de transición. El viaje, como vivencia y como metáfora, supone una huella que conecta con la memoria; un sedimento que invita a la introspección.
Así, los lienzos, las tablas y los papeles que se muestran constituyen elementos únicos de un laberinto por el que adentrarse. En las obras de esta exposición Guillem Nadal atiende a las indicaciones que ofreció Kavafis en el poema “Ítaca” y “pide que el camino sea largo”.

VER CATÁLOGO

GUILLEM NADAL2018-01-01T16:58:04+00:00