After the exhibitions 'Hot Links' and 'De oro en su núcleo', in which we have shown different works by Esther Merinero (Madrid, 1994) at Pradiauto, we are pleased to present in Artesantander a solo project by the artist with a selection of pieces made in 2021 and 2022.
The name of the project, 'Enredo (Un hilo de plata)', responds to her constant interest in delving into the links between objects, bodies and stories. Through portals, jewels, nuts, puddles, keys or chains, Merinero's work is a speculation on the magical capacity of the object to transport and become memory. The project offers a panoramic view of his recent work in different techniques: resin and aluminium sculptures, metallic stitch and cyanotype.
(1994, Madrid). She studied her BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts and recently graduated from an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art with the support of Fundació “La Caixa”, awarding her a a fellowship for postgraduate studies. Her work has been included in international exhibitions at Dada Post (Berlin), Centre del Carme (Valencia), Space2B (Madrid), Charsoo Honar (Tehran) or Saartchi Gallery (London), amongst others. Now represented by Pradiauto (Madrid).
Esther has also given lectures and workshops internationally in institutions such as University of the Arts (London), University for the Creative Arts (Farnham) or in Espositivo Academy (Madrid), and has curated exhibitions such as Archipiélago at the former British Embassy in Madrid, or Baldea.
With 'Around, above and beyond' we close a year of intense collaboration and celebrate what is yet to come. We summarise the journey and preview the next route. On this occasion, the artists will share work in progress, pieces that have been little shown and experiments with new processes.
A walk among honeysuckles, bones and chains. A fantastic landscape of bodies, flowers and forbidden fruits. One more encounter in our garden of delights, between the amorphous and the future.
Karolina Dworska (B. 1997, Rzeszów, Poland) is a Polish artist living and working in London, UK. She graduated from BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 2020, followed by a year-long Fine Art Junior Fellowship at the University. In 2021 she was one of the artists selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in London, Madrid and Seoul, and featured in numerous international publications, including Sztuka i Dokumentacja and El País, as well as Time Out Magazine.
Karolina Dworska’s multidisciplinary practice explores dreams, mythologies and liminal fantasy spaces, situated between the unconscious and reality. Littered with surreal motifs and mysterious inhabitants, her dreamscapes examine the strangeness, abject horror as well as the euphoria of corporeal existence. Desire and longing are also at the core of her work.
She explores the connection between recurring dreams and mythological allegory, and how the seemingly private, internal dream space can be externalised to connect to contemporary narratives and anxieties. Deeply intertextual, her work interweaves folklore, science fiction and the everyday, reconfigured through the meditative lens of dreaming. Dworska utilises textile mediums, in particular rug-tufting, a technique in which she hand constructs pictorial rugs, as well as using machine knitting and elements of sculpture to devise her surreal vision.
(1994, Madrid). She studied her BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts and recently graduated from an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art with the support of Fundació “La Caixa”, awarding her a a fellowship for postgraduate studies. Her work has been included in international exhibitions at Dada Post (Berlin), Centre del Carme (Valencia), Space2B (Madrid), Charsoo Honar (Tehran) or Saartchi Gallery (London), amongst others. Now represented by Pradiauto (Madrid).
Esther has also given lectures and workshops internationally in institutions such as University of the Arts (London), University for the Creative Arts (Farnham) or in Espositivo Academy (Madrid), and has curated exhibitions such as Archipiélago at the former British Embassy in Madrid, or Baldea.
Elisa Pardo Puch (1988, Madrid). After completing her Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts at the UCM at the CES Felipe II in Aranjuez in 2014, she obtained a Master's Degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2017. Previously, in 2010, she completed her Higher Studies in Design at the Escuela de Arte no10 in Madrid, and in 2009, she was the beneficiary of an Erasmus scholarship at the École Duperré in Paris.
She has participated in numerous exhibitions such as ‘Metal Heart: lo que pesa’ at Departamento, Bilbao; ‘Bajo el cielo de la noche’ at Boiler Room, Luis Adelantado Gallery, Valencia; and ‘A Strange Fairytale’ at Pradiauto Gallery, ArteSantander, Santander; or ‘La Espera’, also with Pradiauto, in Madrid. In addition, her work has been part of various group exhibitions, such as the group presentation of the Miquel Casablancas Prize 2023 in Barcelona; ‘Malas Hierbas’ at CasaBanchel, Madrid, in 2024; ‘Una exposición oral’ at Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona; and ‘Garden Shed’ at Villa Bergerie, in Huesca, in 2023, among others.
Elisa Pardo Puch has also participated in various artistic residencies, such as the current one at GlogauAIR, Berlin, from January to June 2024, where she created the work for the exhibition Quienes vagan curiosos por mil maravillas; the Residency at Villa Bergerie, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Huesca, 2023; Artist in Residence Munich, 2022; or the Matadero Artist Residency Programme. CRA Matadero, Madrid, 2020. Pardo Puch has received numerous awards such as the Miquel Casablancas Prize (finalist), Barcelona, 2023; Acquisition Prize at Nada Sobra, Nebrija University, Madrid, 2017; and Special Mention at Getxoarte, Bilbao, 2016.
"The Waiting is based on a sensation I had on a journey. From a monotonous state, a feeling of vitality arose that took me out of the repetition and automatism of everyday life. The production of the exhibition has been a state of waiting, an anxious contention to find a vital outburst again, a working in a direction with the conviction that at some point it will happen again."
We are very happy to present The Waiting the first solo project by Elisa Pardo Puch (Madrid, 1988) at Pradiauto. The exhibition presents a selection of recent works and includes installation, watercolour drawing, ceramics and patchwork.
At the same time as this exhibition offers a panoramic view of the techniques and motifs already characteristic of her work, in The Waiting a new formal language opens up, a lurking and unpredictable aesthetic outbreak. The grid is filled with honeysuckle, meandering forms peep out, between chains there are vibrant fruits, the cube explodes and drips. In the face of repetition, an anxious force that tries to escape from it. In the face of the weft, like the structure of a fabric that takes shape over time, the explosion that breaks it. Against the comfort of the domestic, a wild irruption. We witness, in The Waiting, the birth of a kind of contrastetics - an internal revolution that alters its own code, an opposing flow that integrates itself, from the root, to continue to open up meaning.
Elisa Pardo Puch (1988, Madrid). After completing her Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts at the UCM at the CES Felipe II in Aranjuez in 2014, she obtained a Master's Degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2017. Previously, in 2010, she completed her Higher Studies in Design at the Escuela de Arte no10 in Madrid, and in 2009, she was the beneficiary of an Erasmus scholarship at the École Duperré in Paris.
She has participated in numerous exhibitions such as ‘Metal Heart: lo que pesa’ at Departamento, Bilbao; ‘Bajo el cielo de la noche’ at Boiler Room, Luis Adelantado Gallery, Valencia; and ‘A Strange Fairytale’ at Pradiauto Gallery, ArteSantander, Santander; or ‘La Espera’, also with Pradiauto, in Madrid. In addition, her work has been part of various group exhibitions, such as the group presentation of the Miquel Casablancas Prize 2023 in Barcelona; ‘Malas Hierbas’ at CasaBanchel, Madrid, in 2024; ‘Una exposición oral’ at Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona; and ‘Garden Shed’ at Villa Bergerie, in Huesca, in 2023, among others.
Elisa Pardo Puch has also participated in various artistic residencies, such as the current one at GlogauAIR, Berlin, from January to June 2024, where she created the work for the exhibition Quienes vagan curiosos por mil maravillas; the Residency at Villa Bergerie, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Huesca, 2023; Artist in Residence Munich, 2022; or the Matadero Artist Residency Programme. CRA Matadero, Madrid, 2020. Pardo Puch has received numerous awards such as the Miquel Casablancas Prize (finalist), Barcelona, 2023; Acquisition Prize at Nada Sobra, Nebrija University, Madrid, 2017; and Special Mention at Getxoarte, Bilbao, 2016.
“Una exposición es un archipiélago de imágenes y vibraciones. A la vez un mapa y un contramapa, lo que oculta y lo que revela.”¹
The exhibition Harp and Throat fuses the recent work of Gabriel Alonso, Madrid, 1986 and Vica Pacheco, Oxaca, Mexico, 1993. The project takes its title from Inuit throat songs. In this community - before going hunting or while preparing for a special event - throat songs are usually performed by a circle of dancing women. Made from rhythmic grunts, breaths and guttural sound, accompanied by a metal harp, these wordless songs reproduce the sound of winds, water and calling gees. They arise as ritualistic celebrations of prosperity and good luck.
Fascinated by the devices that humans have always created to navigate towards the unknown and by the way we relate to uncertain landscapes, Gabriel Alonso proposes a cartography made of a historical journey on the origin of maps and navigation tools. Materialized as a series of newly produced sculptures, his counter-maps invert the logic of our representation of the explored globe, fictioning another relation between the water and the earth, our fear and our faith. This spatial and narrative landscape is inhabited by a sound piece in constant evolution by Vica Pacheco: A Breath Manifest, 2022. Vica’s breath composes her track as the only instrument she has. Just as the waves of the sea don’t add up, the just come and leave, breath does not accumulate, it just passes through our body, leaves and starts again, interrupting the silence.
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¹ Carrión, J. Selection of fragments written for this exhibition and quotes from Membrana (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2021), Todos los museos son novelas de ciencia ficción (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022) and El Museo (with Sagar, MNAC-Norma Editorial, September 2022).
was born in Oaxaca, southern Mexico in 1993, she lives and works in Brussels. She studied Art at La Esmeralda in México City before graduating from Villa Arson in France in 2017. Her artistic work is above all eclectic and energetic, regardless of her sources of inspiration and her concerns for mythological crossbreeding, prehispanic technologies and sincretism, she likes to arrange the most heterogeneous or hazardous elements between them, to produce sound performances and installations. She has a practice rooted into experimental music and composition, but she also has a plastic practice going through ceramics and 3d animation.
Pradiauto is pleased to present "Deep Dive", the first exhibition in the space dedicated to two London-based artists. Karolina Dworska (1997, Rzeszów, Poland) is a graduate from Goldsmiths University and this year has been awarded the New Contemporaries prize —the UK's leading support network for emerging art practices— and her most recent work will be shown in conversation with the painting of Kin-Ting Li, (1991, Hong Kong, China) a 2019 graduate of the Slade School of Fine Arts, London.
The exhibition "Deep Dive" delves into the work of these two artists and reclaims the world of dreams and the amorphous as a place of pure potency. The title of this proposal refers or alludes to that inner, intimate and personal dive that takes place during sleep. Both artists allow themselves to be absorbed in a dreamlike tunnel of illogical forms and dismembered bodies, elements that they then incorporate as part of their artistic imaginary. They both enter, from very different processes, into places full of viscosity, fragile fantasy and agitated dreams, carrying out a dual exercise of respect for fantasy and memory.
In dialogue with this project, Pradiauto presents a selection of drawings by Javier Chozas, who lives and works in Madrid. The artist, who also graduated from Goldsmiths in 2018, shows on this occasion a selection of works on paper and resin reliefs. Pradiauto seeks to recognise his work in the field of drawing and the importance of the line in a work often identified with sculpture.
Karolina Dworska (B. 1997, Rzeszów, Poland) is a Polish artist living and working in London, UK. She graduated from BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 2020, followed by a year-long Fine Art Junior Fellowship at the University. In 2021 she was one of the artists selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in London, Madrid and Seoul, and featured in numerous international publications, including Sztuka i Dokumentacja and El País, as well as Time Out Magazine.
Karolina Dworska’s multidisciplinary practice explores dreams, mythologies and liminal fantasy spaces, situated between the unconscious and reality. Littered with surreal motifs and mysterious inhabitants, her dreamscapes examine the strangeness, abject horror as well as the euphoria of corporeal existence. Desire and longing are also at the core of her work.
She explores the connection between recurring dreams and mythological allegory, and how the seemingly private, internal dream space can be externalised to connect to contemporary narratives and anxieties. Deeply intertextual, her work interweaves folklore, science fiction and the everyday, reconfigured through the meditative lens of dreaming. Dworska utilises textile mediums, in particular rug-tufting, a technique in which she hand constructs pictorial rugs, as well as using machine knitting and elements of sculpture to devise her surreal vision.
(Hong Kong, 1991) attempts, through her painting practice, to create new forms and address the subjectivity of interpretation. Through interlocking perspectives and shifting forms, the paintings are situated within a space filled with various forms of fictional construction. The observation of everyday life gives rise to a visual composite of textures, organic structures and objects simplified into almost symbolic forms.
(Madrid, 1972) completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in August 2018. He has also completed an MFA at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid and holds a degree in Architecture from the School of Architecture of Madrid. His work has been exhibited at the Tenderpixel gallery in London, La Casa Encendida, Matadero and Tabacalera (Madrid), Würth Museum (La Rioja), P60 (Amstelveen), Kunsthaus Bethanien (Berlin), La Panacée (Montpellier) and Bólit (Girone), among others. He has published his first essay, Digital Time. Narcissos narcotizados, in 2014. He writes regularly for BritEs Magazine.
Pradiauto is pleased to present the group exhibition "De Oro en su Núcleo". The project starts from the city of London and the Royal College of Art as the beginning of diverse links between Esther Merinero, Lina Lapelytė, Alejandro Villa Durán and Frederik Nystrup-Larsen. The exhibition is activated as a zone of convergence of ideas and artistic intuitions. An encounter that had already begun in time and is now materialising in space.
"De Oro en su Núcleo" collects, through flow, fluidity and narrative, a series of gestures and interactions with history, nature, the magical and the contemporary subject that materialise in very different ways, but which share and meet in a fragile perception of the rhythms of today's society. The works in the exhibition place us in uncertain and disturbing places —in the middle of a torrent, a portal, a jungle or a dream— places where only fiction, fable and magic can guide us.
(1994, Madrid). She studied her BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts and recently graduated from an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art with the support of Fundació “La Caixa”, awarding her a a fellowship for postgraduate studies. Her work has been included in international exhibitions at Dada Post (Berlin), Centre del Carme (Valencia), Space2B (Madrid), Charsoo Honar (Tehran) or Saartchi Gallery (London), amongst others. Now represented by Pradiauto (Madrid).
Esther has also given lectures and workshops internationally in institutions such as University of the Arts (London), University for the Creative Arts (Farnham) or in Espositivo Academy (Madrid), and has curated exhibitions such as Archipiélago at the former British Embassy in Madrid, or Baldea.
(Kaunas, 1984) bases her performance practice on music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes and nostalgia. Her works involve both trained and untrained performers, often through singing across a wide range of genres such as pop music and opera. The singing takes the form of a collective and affective event that questions vulnerability and silencing. In 2019 her collaborative performance work Sun & Sea (Marina) received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Art Biennale. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Cartier Foundation, Paris; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; RIBOCA2 - Riga Biennale; Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; Glasgow International; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Kaunas Biennale, Lithuania; Pompeii Commitment and Castello di Rivoli, Italy.
(Jalisco, 1993) is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London. He previously studied Textile Design at Central Saint Martins London.
The starting point of his pictorial and sculptural work is “intuitive choreography”, a term that condenses a methodological repetition: going out, moving about in order to return, and then tracing the route. In general, these trips outside the city seek for the body to become the means for an attentive presence in its surroundings. The wager is not on an interpretation of the natural, but rather on a singular relation that allows the general body a differential when affected by the encounter: that is, by the unpredictable. The sensation opens up and the perception responds not by precipitating the signs, but by establishing a line of interpretation, a position–with a view to being shared–about what is experienced.
Upon returning, the second part of the process begins. Thinking of production as a kind of transit, Alejandro usually works in series that allow me to explore what has been lived and experienced, while this is affected by each medium’s materials and conditions.
In painting, the limit is the color palette itself, which I select before starting. More than a representation, painting is for me a choreography that begins and ends with the body: the hand traces, but the body moves on the canvas. This emits a temporality linked to the trance between painting and memory; painting is the presence in front of the picture, while memory (of the journey that precedes the practice) is the counterpoint that builds the rhythm of the composition. In it, the overlapping of marks and blotches is as relevant as the void that sustains both the experience and the image.
(Copenhagen, 1992) graduated from the MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2020. His final exhibition was shown at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her practice is focused on an object-oriented discussion of function and aesthetics. Her conceptually informed sculptural practice always includes an underlying love for the universal rules of beauty that transcends all form and composition. Her work is marked by a transversal aesthetic approach, evident in both her sculptures and written pieces, which addresses and questions the functions of translation in relation to poetry.
This exhibition brings together six artists whose work explores language and delves into its codes, failures and capacity to act as a trap. From different visual languages, the works propose gestures, processes, materials and actions that slip and separate themselves from the rigid ideal of language, imagining new codes of contact. The works in this exhibition disarticulate languages and reinvent them through randomness, repetition, deviation and superposition.
The title recalls a poem by the writer Jane Hirshfield "The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief, but does not feel them (...)". In her texts, the author addresses themes such as the functioning of the metaphorical mind, translation, the search for resistance through poetry, surprise, uncertainty and paradox.
(Newcastle, 1977) lives and works in London. He graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2001 with a BA Fine Art (Studio Practice and Contemporary Critical Theory). In 2016, Dean was a Turner Prize nominee and in 2018, he was nominated for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Dean's solo exhibitions include Government at Henry Moore Institute (2010), Qualities of Violence at De Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2015), Sic Glyphs at South London Gallery (2016), Lost True Leaves at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, U.S.A. (2016), Tender Tender at Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Munster and Stamen Papers at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2016).
(Vic, 1991) lives and works between Barcelona and Torelló. She is dedicated to artistic practice, through which she carries out various explorations of language. She has exhibited in different spaces in Barcelona and Tarragona, as well as in Mexico and Germany. She complements her artistic production with theoretical research at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Applied Languages of the University of Vic. She also writes art criticism for A*Desk and Encuentros and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in Torelló and at La Farinera in Vic. She is co-founder of the collectives Murió de Frío and Supterranis (organisers of the Festival Plaga) and member of the visual arts commission of the Festival Festus, Torelló.
Elisa Pardo Puch (1988, Madrid). After completing her Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts at the UCM at the CES Felipe II in Aranjuez in 2014, she obtained a Master's Degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2017. Previously, in 2010, she completed her Higher Studies in Design at the Escuela de Arte no10 in Madrid, and in 2009, she was the beneficiary of an Erasmus scholarship at the École Duperré in Paris.
She has participated in numerous exhibitions such as ‘Metal Heart: lo que pesa’ at Departamento, Bilbao; ‘Bajo el cielo de la noche’ at Boiler Room, Luis Adelantado Gallery, Valencia; and ‘A Strange Fairytale’ at Pradiauto Gallery, ArteSantander, Santander; or ‘La Espera’, also with Pradiauto, in Madrid. In addition, her work has been part of various group exhibitions, such as the group presentation of the Miquel Casablancas Prize 2023 in Barcelona; ‘Malas Hierbas’ at CasaBanchel, Madrid, in 2024; ‘Una exposición oral’ at Sant Andreu Contemporani, Barcelona; and ‘Garden Shed’ at Villa Bergerie, in Huesca, in 2023, among others.
Elisa Pardo Puch has also participated in various artistic residencies, such as the current one at GlogauAIR, Berlin, from January to June 2024, where she created the work for the exhibition Quienes vagan curiosos por mil maravillas; the Residency at Villa Bergerie, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Huesca, 2023; Artist in Residence Munich, 2022; or the Matadero Artist Residency Programme. CRA Matadero, Madrid, 2020. Pardo Puch has received numerous awards such as the Miquel Casablancas Prize (finalist), Barcelona, 2023; Acquisition Prize at Nada Sobra, Nebrija University, Madrid, 2017; and Special Mention at Getxoarte, Bilbao, 2016.
(Bilbao, 1979) lives and works between London and Berlin. She holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Deusto, another in Sculpture from the Wimbledon School of Art (London) and a master's degree in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (London). Her solo exhibitions include: Stay Twice, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany (2019); Faces, Espai 13, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, Spain (2019); Ask the Dust, Museum of Contemporary Art of Santa Barbara, California, USA (2018-19); New Clear Family, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Germany (2018); The only way out is in, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2017); Book! Don't tell me what to do, Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico City, Mexico (2017); Dumb Bells, Saturdays Live, Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2016); Cosmic Clap, MOT International, London; UK (2015); Motor Motor, Praxis, Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2012). Recently, she was part of the curatorial project Absolute Beginners at CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain (2020).
Pradiauto presents "Far Away From Anywhere Else", Gabriel Alonso's first site-specific project at La Mosca, Madrid.
Including sculpture, painting and installation, "Far Away From Anywhere Else" is configured as a mutant ecosystem whose human and non-human bodies attend to the environmental, temporal and physical changes of their immediate context. Although the exhibition takes the form of a series of works, it is above all the reactions, effects and interrelationships that are generated within and between them. The project explores the human intention to preserve life and maintain its form. Through a large inhabited stage, the installation responds to and reproduces the dose of artifice associated with any attempt to imitate the natural. By activating an arbitrary choreography of material, physical and chemical processes, the proposal makes visible and reacts to human mechanisms of control.
Halfway between the sculptural, the constructive and the environmental, "Far Away From Anywhere Else" emerges by placing a fluid, viscous and ephemeral world in a container that allows these properties to expand. Without pursuing a closed discourse, the sculptures - whose materials and forms need constant care - are fragments of a reflection on the fragility of life, which coexists and is channelled by the human imagination. The place becomes a great thirsty organism that requires an exact dose of hydration, alchemy and speculation. Materials speak to us from their own qualities in order to communicate. Soil, water, resin, branches, mud and fertilisers die, explode, dry out, decompose and grow. Somehow, change and contingency direct this place from disorder but also from stillness and beauty.
"Far Away From Anywhere Else" proposes a strange and illogical world in which to imagine new bonds, empathies and ways of remaining. What if light could be fertilised? What if bones floated? Is the jellyfish talking to us when it stings us? What if you grew up in a garden of toxic plants? Can the exhibition be poisoned?
Pradiauto hosts the first FOCUS of the Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid), which focuses on the artistic practice of Eulàlia Rovira and Adrian Schindler. It is the first occasion in which a selection of their joint work, developed in parallel to their individual practices, is shown in Madrid. Their collaboration is vertebrated by writing and poses exercises of displacement of both the eye that looks and the voice that narrates. Moving between the underground and the surface, the pieces traverse gases, bones, chemicals, divinities, technologies and plants in an attempt to subvert the centrality of the subject.
"Une lampe éclaire une lampe qui éclaire", "La Part Sombre" and "When you light this rock it burns like wood", delve into oil shale, a hydrocarbon-rich sedimentary rock that was mined before the discovery of oil.
By stopping at a gesture as minimal as peeling a fruit discarded by mass consumption, La figa, l'espina, l'escut reclaims a space of latency and singularity outside the systems of standardization and exclusion. Bringing together pieces from the last four years, the exhibition moves through fields and issues common to the framework of the Institute for Postnatural Studies such as geology, fossil fuels, global trade, landscape and non-human agency.
(France/Germany, 1989) has lived in Spain since 2014. In his practice he addresses the link between historical events, cultural production and state ideology, with specific emphasis on their impact on subjectivities. Often collaborative in nature, it takes the form of performance art pieces, films, installations and public encounters. His work has been presented at MACBA (2021), The Green Parrot, Barcelona (2021), Espositivo, Madrid (2021), Fabra i Coats, Barcelona (2021), Centre d’art Le Lait, Albi (2020), the Mahal Art Space, Tangier (2019), La Grande Halle de La Villette, Paris (2018), La Capella, Barcelona (2017) or FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2017). His residences include Casa de Velázquez, Madrid (2020-21, 2019), Château Nour, Brussels (2020), Superdeals, Brussels (2018), Le Centquatre, Paris (2014-15) and ZK/U, Berlin (2012-13). He has studied at the Institute for Art in Context, UdK Berlin (2015), la École des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2012), Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011).
(Barcelona, 1985) holds a degree in Fine Arts and a master's degree in Art in Context from the UdK in Berlin. Her practice explores the foundations that structure Western righteousness and how they petrify bodies and language. Recently, she has exhibited at Twin Gallery (Madrid), Capella de Sant Roc (Valls), Centro de Arte La Panera (Lleida), M|A|C (Mataró), Centro de Arte Maristany (Sant Cugat) or Sala Amadís de Injuve (Madrid). Since 2013 he has also been working in collaboration with the artist Adrian Schindler. They have exhibited at Musée de Bibracte (Saint-Léger-sur-Beuvray, FR), Sala Muncunill (Terrassa), Homesession and Fireplace (Barcelona), and in group exhibitions or screenings such as Galerie Martin Janda (Vienna), àngelsbarcelona, EtHall (Hospitalet), Turf Projects (Croydon, UK), Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria), ZKU - Center for Art and Urbanistics (Berlin) and the Escocesa (Barcelona). In 2018 they were awarded the visual arts grant from the Güell Foundation.
Gabriel went to collect pieces of broken cars to make molds and a few days later he walked to the Pradolongo park to pick flowers. Lucia found a basket in Madrid, took it to her studio and covered it with paper pulp and her friend's blue comics. She sanded, the basket began to draw on the pulp. Esther dreamed of oil stains on a workshop floor. With translux epoxy resin she painted those stains until they climbed the walls of her studio becoming windows, or as she calls them, portals. Rafa fell in love with a beam that is now white. Towards the sharp curve she stepped in between. Now they are friends. Elisa researched racing. Horse racing, car racing. At horse races, picnic tablecloths were also the end flags. Victor: pipes, conductor, funnels, troughs and tunnels. Conductive spaces with their own form.
Hot links presents the work of six artists who are closely linked to the city of Madrid. The exhibition inaugurates Pradiauto: born as a reaction to its transformation. The artists have developed their pieces in parallel and in connection with the mutation of Pradiauto, a mechanical workshop that becomes an exhibition space. In turn, the project observes similarities between the different lives of the space, which in both cases have to do with an exercise of care, repair and commissioning.
