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26/3/2010

Four exhibitions

La Conservera, Murcia

La Conservera Contemporary Art Centre (Ceutí/Murcia) is pleased to announce its fourth series of exhibitions, opening Saturday March 27th. On view to the general public beginning Sunday March 28th, this latest series of exhibitions features solo shows by artists Lili Dujourie (Roeselare, Belgium-1941), Carolina Silva (Madrid, Spain-1975) and Lily van der Stokker (Hertogenbosch, Holland- 1954). At the same time, La Conservera and Espacio AV are working together again to host two concurrent exhibitions by Elena del Rivero (Valencia, Spain-1949).

These four artists share common concerns and interests. Though coming from different generations, they all present works revolving around notions of horizontality, the relationship between experience and nature, the oneiric and the memory. The four exhibitions produced by La Conservera explore the actual exhibition space itself, allowing for a unique, enveloping and mysterious sensorial experience. The work of these artists provides a new and silent perspective on the often less recognised practice of women artists.

Elena del Rivero
A Drawing Fallen From The Sky
Space 1

Elena del Rivero started working as an artist in 1975. She spent most of the 1980s in Madrid, creating paintings and etchings that mirrored her interest in New Expressionism. The most significant stylistic shift in her way of working probably took place in 1988, during the year she spent in Rome, when she began to experiment with geometric forms and grid structures. After moving to New York in the early 1990s, her practice witnessed an intensification of aspects related to seriality and process, incorporating compositional nuances that enabled a more profound exploration of her concerns.

The first series of Letters to the Mother dates from 1992 and consists of various combinations of graphite with oil paint and olive oil. These works signal a transition from the artist’s Neo-Expressionist approaches to more restrained proposals. Letters to the Mother, a series of drawings examining the archetype of the mother, were the first works in a series del Rivero made from 1992 to 1999, creating approximately 3,000 in total. In conceiving this piece, the artist loosely drew her inspiration from Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father (1919) - passionate stories about the relationship between a father and a son. From the early 1990s onwards, Elena del Rivero expanded the scope of the letters with other series such as Letters from the Bride. Each of these groups of drawings is inspired by a traditional female role (mother, daughter, wife, lover), demonstrating that these old social archetypes are a particularly fertile ground for artistic creation.

[Sw:it] Home: A Chant (2001-2006) is a monumental appendix to her body of work dealing with the domestic realm. Shortly after completing [Sw:it] Home, the artist’s home-studio was seriously damaged by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. When the South Tower opposite her studio collapsed, an avalanche of documents, objects and pieces of paper entered through the windows. Elena del Rivero reacted in her habitual way, namely, incorporating all that she could find at hand into her work, metaphorically transforming all of the debris. The artist cleaned, restored and archived all these remains and, after erasing the names appearing in the documents, she sewed and embroidered them onto five rolls of muslin fabric. This cascading curtain of papers was displayed alongside videos of the place in real time and music composed by Butch Morris.

Produced by La Conservera, Elena del Rivero is presenting the installation A Drawing Fallen From The Sky in Space 1. The installation represents the Andromeda Galaxy as if fallen onto the ground of the exhibition space. The work is the continuation of a series of installations titled Celestial Holes (the oculi so often seen in medieval cathedrals that show the passing of the firmament above), previously shown in San Sebastian, Salamanca, Madrid and Gerona. Made with sequins, pearls and glitter, elements del Rivero had previously used in her works on paper. A Drawing Fallen From The Sky, as displayed at La Conservera, carries the series of Celestial Holes one step further by incorporating sound from the town of Ceutí in real time.

As José María Parreño explains in his essay for the exhibition catalogue: “Andromeda is the farthest object from the earth visible to the naked eye, at no less than 2,500,000 light-years. With a mass calculated at around 400,000 million solar masses—approximately one and a half times the mass of the Milky Way, Andromeda is moving towards us at a speed of 140 kilometres per second and it is believed that within 3,000 million years it could collide with us... It is named after Andromeda from Greek mythology, which means “who rules over men”. If there is a perfect vision of the sublime, insomuch as incommensurable and overwhelming, it is this. The operation enacted by Elena del Rivero pays tribute to beauty and, as such, denies the terror equally contained within the sidereal. The strings of pearls and beads create a tapestry of bright shining colours worthy of The Thousand and One Nights. Yet this gigantic chaos is the Universe. And one is unable to make up one’s mind whether to be awestruck more by its boundless randomness or the possibility that it is all orderly, planned and regular. In any case, Elena del Rivero has undertaken a patient and precise task so that the eye recognises the outline of a galaxy in this combination of chaos and order.” This installation is conceived in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition at Espacio AV titled Flying Drawings as a single project.

La Conservera and Espacio AV have published a catalogue for these two exhibitions with essays by José María Parreño, John Yau, Alissa Casey and Joana Masó. Elena del Rivero (Valencia, Spain, 1949) lives and works in New York. She has had one-person shows in 2009: Universidad de Barcelona, Barcelona. 2008: The Corcoran, Washington. 2006: Art Nueve, Murcia; IVAM, Valencia; Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Fundación La Caixa, Lerida. 2004: Dieu Donne, New York. 2002: Universidad de Salamanca. 2001: Drawing Center, New York; Art in General, New York; Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. 1998: Reina Sofía, Madrid. 1996: Espacio Caja Burgos. Her work has also been seen in 2007: Lines, Grids, Stains, Words, MOMA, New York. 2005: Barrocos y Neobarrocos, DA 2 Domus Artium, Salamanca. 2004: Encuentro entre dos colecciones, Fundación Serralves, Oporto / Fundación la Caixa Barcelona; Don’t call it performance, Museo del Barrio, New York / CAAC, Seville; Books as Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington. 2003: Il Raconto del Filo, MART di Trento e Rovereto; Miradas complices, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela. 2002: Entre Líneas, Casa Encendida, Madrid; Gótico... pero Exótico, ARTIUM, Vitoria. 2000: Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. 1998: Interlacings: The Craft of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum, Stamford. 1997: New Work: Drawings Today, SFMoMA, San Francisco. 1995: Johannesburg Biennial.

Carolina Silva
Círculo ilusionistas
Space 2

Carolina Silva understands illusionism as the power to make things appear and disappear and to make the impossible believable. In this exhibition, she transforms the static nature of the various spaces. The immaterial quality of light and smoke, the transparency and frailty of glass, the instability of the floor, and the vulnerability of pencil drawing all become key elements in this quest for the “impossible”, for what lies on the other side, inhabited by darkness or by the unknown. All the works in this show are undercut by a dichotomy defined by the inside-outside, interior-exterior, as well as by the unattainable ambition to connect the two realms. Instability is another feature shared by all the works. The fleeting and evanescent quality of smoke and light, rather than acting as functional elements, offer a code or signal for us to decipher. Light appears and disappears, revealing presences that activate emptiness as it cuts across the space. Those almost imperceptible presences are able to transport us to another time, to another reality where past, present and future are conflated.

Produced entirely by La Conservera, Silva’s exhibition is located in Space 2 and consists of two pieces. In order to exhibit the video installation Sombras de duda, Room B in Space 2 has been transformed into a dark circular space 11 meters in diameter which houses a rotating projection system that projects a constant circular movement onto the wall as if it were the light beam from a lighthouse revealing the surrounding space. The video-projection consists of an animation featuring pencil-drawn children appearing like ghosts in the space. Their presence sets off magical actions (floating chairs, bulbs moving on their own, wallpaper transforming itself...). The installation and the revolving action of the projection provoke a feeling of instability in the visitor, forcing us to spin in circles as we try to imagine lost fragments.

Room A in Space 2 hosts the installation Agua Eléctrica. The space has been transformed into a closed and claustrophobic room; the only way out is a 60 cm circular hole in the wall opposite the entrance door. To enter the room, we must open a door, which then closes behind us once we are inside the space. The walls are covered with pencil drawings. A glass ladder leads to the hole, acting as a kind of bridge between this space and the outside. The room remains in darkness, with one odd ray of light entering through the hole. This light rotates in a circular motion, sweeping the inside. The glass ladder is handmade by the Real Fábrica de Cristales of La Granja (Royal Crystal Factory, La Granja). A third installation, titled Todas las voces muertas, is activated for one hour at the opening and closing of La Conservera everyday. Given the magical nature of this installation, neither its location nor its features are revealed. Visitors will have to discover it for themselves.

La Conservera has published a catalogue for the exhibition with an essay by Javier Montes. Carolina Silva (Madrid, Spain, 1975) lives and works in Seattle. She has had one-person shows in 2007: La Casa Encendida, Madrid. 2006: Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid; Art Space Tetra, Fukoa, Japan. 2004: Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco. 2003: Fish Tank Gallery, New York. 2002: Next Gallery, New York. Her work has also been seen in 2009: Explum, Puerto Lumbrera; Becas Generación 2008, Madrid; Doméstico09, Madrid, 2009. 2008: IVAM, Valencia; Museo de Pollença; Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca. 2007: Planes Futuros. Baluarte, Pamplona; Aquí y Ahora, Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid; Destino Futuro, Jardín Botánico, Madrid. 2004: The Line Up. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco.

Lily van der Stokker
Flower Floor Painting
Space 3

Most often taking the form of elaborate and decorative wall drawings, Lily van der Stokker’s pieces are subtended with a child-like innocence and teenage naivety. In a disarmingly unabashed and exuberant fashion, they address ideas of beauty, love, relationships, family and the everyday. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, their apparent simplicity van der Stokker's works are often challenging, and she is earning a growing reputation as an increasingly important artist in the discourse of post-feminist practice. Van der Stokker plays with stereotypes of femininity, creating a style she calls "nonshouting feminism" which explores ideas seemingly prohibited in art, especially the decorative, the sentimental and the "nice". In her decorous medium of colour-pencil drawings on A4 paper, she uses the palette of baby clothes and examines the gaping void between the art world and all other creativity. In a second phase, the drawings are transferred to the wall, creating fascinating wall paintings, executed freehand.

These walls challenge the official aura surrounding the concept of art. The vocabulary of signs deployed by the artist is the result of years of experimentation, giving shape to a world of ornamental motifs taken to the extreme and invested with a brand of joyous subversion in which Lily van der Stokker unfolds a poetics of the insignificant. The apparent uselessness of the elegance of her dynamic and organic motifs reveals an approach that leans towards a type of art that, rather than being exclusive, is satisfying and participatory. In general, her paintings incorporate text and, on many occasions, furniture, endowing the pieces with a certain three-dimensional nature. The ambiguity of her sentences evokes a collective dimension allowing for artistic experience as well as the banal, the stereotyped and everyday language.

For her first solo show in Spain, at Space 3 in La Conservera, Lily van der Stokker has created her first floor- based work, something of a personal challenge. It is a huge painting measuring 40 x 14 metres and crawls up the perimeter wall to a height of 1.5 metre. The motifs consist of a number of gigantic flowers made in light fluorescent tones. Flower Floor Painting continues the invasive quality of her wall paintings on architecture; the most significant example of which, to date, is the building whose façade she painted for the Expo 2000 Hanover World’s Fair, curated by Kaspar Köning. Seen from the outside, in courtyard 2, this monumental painting seems like an artificial garden cloistered inside an architectural interior. To create it, the artist required 20 days and the assistance of 18 Fine Arts students from the Region of Murcia. La Conservera has published a catalogue for the exhibition with an essay by Mariuccia Casadio.

Lily van der Stokker (Hertogenbosch, Holland -1954) lines and works in Amsterdam. She has had one-person shows in 2010: Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam. 2007: Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven. 2004: Worcester Museum of Modern Art; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; VIVIDvormgeving, Rotterdam. 2003: Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Voor Moderne Kunsten Arnhem. 2002: Le Consortium, Dijon. 2000: The Cabinet Gallery, London; Galerie Klosterfelder, Hamburg. 1998: Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam. 1996: Le Consortium, Dijon. 1991: Museum Fodor, Amsterdam.

Her work has also been seen in 2009: Portrait de l’Artiste en Motocycliste, Magasin, Grenoble. 2008: In the cherished company of others, De Appel, Amsterdam. 2007: To the Wall, Aspen Art Museum. 2005: Frontiers, Worcester Art Museum; Les apparences sont souvent trompeuses, CAPC, Bordeaux. 2003: Flower Power, Lille 2004 Capital Cultural; 7th Lyon Biennial; Melodrama, MARCO, Vigo. 2001: Let’s Entertain, Miami Art Museum / The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 2000: The Art Project of Expo 2000, Hannover; Au-delà du spectacle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1999: Officina Europa, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; De coraz(i)on, Centro Cultural Tecla Sala, Barcelona. 1998: Lovecraft, South London Gallery, London; DeNaturalized, MCA, Chicago. 1997: Dramatically Different, Le Magasin, Grenoble.

Lili Dujourie
Space 4

Lili Dujourie’s practice includes video works and, most recently, paper collages, sculptures and installations suspended in a state of categorical ambiguity and fleetingness. Recurrent features in her work include a reflection on the models and categories within art history, gender issues within literature and film, and an emotional understanding of space. Through an aesthetic grounded in the Flemish tradition of Rubens and Vermeer, her work triggers an intellectual, sensual and poetic feeling in the spectator and conveys a sense of melancholy and feelings of loss and longing. By using closed interiors and fractured pictorial spaces and titles, she emphasizes the sense of something “held back” and invites introspection.

In the early 1970s, Lili Dujourie created a body of work that pays tribute to American Minimal Art yet maintains a critical distance. From 1972 to 1981, Dujourie experimented with video and, in the 1980s with textiles, in works whose movement and exuberant colour directed our attention both to the space of theatre and to old Flemish masters. In Documenta 12, she presented a series of works made in clay with concave and convex forms, arranged in groups, as well as a series of extremely delicate works consisting of portraits made with steel cable.

For her first solo sculpture exhibition in Spain, Lili Dujourie presents, in Space 4 at La Conservera, five new site-specific sculptures titled Maelstrom, distributed on the ground floor of the space. Handmade with papier- mâché, a new medium for her, they have required months of research and technical challenges. These sculptures are reminiscent of organic forms springing from the ground as if roots winding around themselves and take their names from the Norwegian maritime maelstroms.

Memories of Hands, 2007 is comprised of six fired clay pieces made with subtle undulating forms placed on shelves around the room’s perimeter. In these works, Dujourie focuses on the sensuousness and immediacy of the material. Though they all have a similar appearance, each piece is unique. It is hard to imagine how they could have been made so exactly.

The use of papier-mâché and clay, new to Dujourie’s work, points to her rethinking of sculpture today. In the aftermath of Minimalism, Formalism and Abstraction, these materials represent a sort of return to the essence of things, that primeval “thing” of creation – a fresh beginning. Expressionistic and organic, this series shifts between the figurative and the abstract, suggesting the possibility of several objects, creatures or forms, while remaining imaginatively flexible. Here, sculpture is, once again, taken as a passionate and conceptual “hands-on” activity.

Towards the back of the ground floor, we see the 7-screen video installation produced by La Conservera titled Il fait dimanche sur la mer, 2009, which was presented for the first time at Beaufort-03, the sculpture triennial held in Ostend. It consists of 7 synchronised video screens, each one of them displaying projections of the 24 hours of one day in the week, from Monday to Sunday, in March 2009. To make this work, Dujourie placed a camera on the top floor of an apartment block on the seafront in Ostend. For a whole week, the camera filmed the same section of the beach. When the spectator looks at the work, six of the screens show an image frozen at the same time of the day. The screen in motion corresponds to the exact day of the week and time the piece is visited. Details such as the tide, the boats passing along the horizon or the characters seen at the various times of the day, are the only actions taking place in the projection.

In the second floor of Space 4 we find one of this artist’s most important and seminal pieces: Jeu de Dames, 1987. Made in marble and velvet, it contains all the vocabulary that Lili Dujourie would later develop. La Conservera has published a catalogue for the exhibition with an essay by María Nicanor. Lili Dujourie (Roeselare, Belgium -1941) lives and Works in Lovendegem (Ghent). She has had one-person shows in 2008: Le Creux de l'enfer, vallée des Usines, Thiers. 2005: Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. 2004: CAAC, Seville. 2003: Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe. 2001: Kunstzentrum Ostbelgien, Eupen. 1998: Kunstverein München, Munich. 1990: Magasin, Grenoble. 1989: Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn. 1988: Centre d'Art Contemporain, Abbaye Saint-André, Meymac; De Appel, Amsterdam. 1987: FRAC Pays de la Loire.

Her work has also been seen in 2010: Elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris. 2009: Sharjah Biennial, EAU; Art-sur-mer, Beaufort03, sculpture triennial, Ostend. 2008: WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York / MOCA, Los Angeles; 7th Kwangju Biennial, South Korea; 2nd the Hague Biennial. 2007: Documenta 12, Kassel. 2006: The 80's: A Topology, Museo Serralves, Porto. 1999: La Consolation, le Magasin, Grenoble. 1994/95: Cocido y Crudo, Reina Sofía, Madrid. 1993: Trésors de voyage, Monastery of island of San Lazzaro, Venice. 1991-1992: Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. 1988: Sidney Biennial. 1986: Falls the Shadow, Hayward Gallery, London; Aperto 86, Venice Biennale; A Distanced View, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Image: Lily van der Stokker

Press Ana Domínguez
email: anadominguezmad@gmail.com
Tel: +34 91 369 24 58 / +34 609 44 99 27

Image: Lily van der Stokker

Opening 27 March 2010

La Conservera
Avenida de Lorquí, s/n. 30562, Ceutí (Murcia)
tue-sat 10-14, 17-21, sunday 10-14

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