Two exhibitions
dal 28/9/2004 al 23/10/2004
Segnalato da
28/9/2004
Two exhibitions
Marlborough Gallery, New York
Recent Sculpture, an exhibition of recent work by the great Spanish artist Francisco Leiro. Comprised of more than thirty sculptures and drawings, the show will elucidate Leiro s artistic universe, in which tragic sentiment is masked by comic ingenuity, pulsing drama is infused with energy, and gravity cohabits with levity. An exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Daniel Quintero, entitled Tumbling Landscape, which represents a new phase in the development of this Mlaga native who is well known for beautifully rendered figuration.
FRANCISCO LEIRO
Recent Sculpture
September 29-October 23, 2004
The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce that an exhibition of recent work by the great Spanish artist Francisco Leiro will open on September 29 and continue through October 23, 2004. Comprised of more than thirty sculptures and drawings, the show will elucidate Leiro s artistic universe, in which tragic sentiment is masked by comic ingenuity, pulsing drama is infused with energy, and gravity cohabits with levity. This exhibition is a summation of Leiro s artistic production over the last few years and reflects his intimate understanding of materials bronze, wood and iron and his profound knowledge of the traditions of his native Galicia, located in northwestern Spain. Leiro s adoration of polychromy and his particular ironic sense of humor are also evident in the sculptures on view. Since the 1980s, Leiro s work has been considered the most representative of Spanish sculpture: the powerful images of seemingly royal, religious or plebian characters find their sources in the high Middle Ages and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which serve as both references and inspiration for the innovative imagination of this artist whose proximity to contemporary currents such as surrealism and neo-expressionism has been explored in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Leiro familiarized himself with sculpture at an early age: both in the bakery of his maternal grandparents, where he modeled figures with bread dough, and in the carpenter s shop of his paternal grandfather, a dedicated wood carver who created work for churches in the Cambados region in Galicia. Leiro s unmistakable oeuvre, founded on traditional Galician sculpture and archaic shapes, is derived through the juxtaposition of figurative and abstract forms. The provocative results are sculptures with allegorical connotations whose narrative references are situated beyond history and beyond memory, evoking an ironic and timeless fiction: a veritable gallery of the human condition wrought in wood and metal whose altered shapes and exaggerated movements are further developed in the ingenious use of polychromy which unites form and color. Born in the small town of Cambados, Galicia in 1957, Leiro later moved to Santiago de Compostela to study stone work at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios. His studies continued in Madrid at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where his focus was on both sculpture and drawing. Leiro s first solo exhibition occurred in 1975 at the Sociedad Cultural de Cambados, parallel to his inclusion in the Foga Group when the surrealist influence became more accentuated in his work and his inclusion in group shows increased. In the early 1980s he participated in the Atlntica group exhibitions, in which the emerging generation renewed visual arts in Galicia. 1990 was an important year for Leiro: in addition to shows in France and Italy, he had his first exhibition with Marlborough Gallery, New York and since has exhibited consistently here and at Galera Marlborough, Madrid. Recent museum shows include a 2003-2004 traveling solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Foreign Art, Sofia, Bulgaria and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; as well as an extensive show at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa Palacio de Cristal, Madrid. Leiro s work can be found in numerous museum collections, including the Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Asociacin de Amigos del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid; Centro Cultural So Loureno, Almancil; Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporneo, Santiago de Compostela; Coleccin-Fundacin Caja de Madrid; Coleccin Fundacin Coca-Cola, Madrid; Coleccin Fundacin La Caixa, Barcelona; Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey; Instituto del Crdito Oficial, Madrid; Marugame Hirai Museum, Kagawe, Japan; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Barcelona; Museo de Arte Contemporneo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Museo de Bellas Artes de lava,Vitoria; Museo de Castrelo, Vigo; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Leiro has completed numerous public projects, including the following, Mis Sofs (Pontevedra, Spain, 1988), Sireno (Vigo, Spain, 1991), Homenaje a Castelao (Alameda, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1995), Miarritz (Biarritz, France, 1997), Marzo del 73 (Fene, A Corua, Spain, 1997), Astronauta (Valdemoro, Spain, 2001) and Vrtigo (Autova M50, Madrid, Spain, 2004).
A complete color catalogue, with an essay by Kevin Power, Subdirector of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid, Spain, will be available at the time of the exhibition.
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DANIEL QUINTERO
Tumbling Landscape
September 29 October 23, 2004
The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Daniel Quintero, entitled Tumbling Landscape, which represents a new phase in the development of this Mlaga native who is well known for beautifully rendered figuration. In fourteen brilliantly colored and tumultuous landscapes, frequently rendered in oil, tempera and charcoal, Quintero presents a unique compositional strategy based on the equilibrium of instability. With a complete mastery of his technique, the artist makes within the framework of controlled chaos the real landscape cohabit with the imaginary one, thereby fusing reality and fiction. Quintero renders a landscape that becomes his own, through the use of highly personal and expressionistic color, and which impregnates disorder with harmony in an oeuvre filled with emotion and timelessness. This is especially clear in the painting Green Waters, 2003 (76 3/4 x 51 1/8 in. / 195 x 130 cm), in which a typical old European town, with pitched red roofs, Roman arches, bell towers and churches, among other buildings, is cleaved into disarray by slate blue and green water, each structure s topsyturviness reinforced by the artist s quivering line, shifting color and vertiginous perspective. These canvases speak of earth s volatility and humankind s necessary navigation of the ever-shifting results. Francisco Calvo Serraller, noted art historian, comments on the artist s work in the catalogue essay: Quintero was born in Mlaga in 1949 and studied with the great teacher Amadeo Roca until 1969. His studies continued at the Escuela de Cermica and at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, from which he graduated in 1973. For a number of years after he lived in succession in Cornwall, London and Dublin, only to return to his native country in 1981. During this period he had his first solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in London (1977), with which he exhibited again in 1984 and 2004. Shows at Marlborough Gallery, New York and Galera Marlborough, Madrid, have been staged consistently during the intervening twenty years. Recently, the Fundacin Marcelino Botn, Santander, Spain, held an exceptional exhibition of his work. Renowned as a portraitist, Quintero s commissions include likenesses of the King and Queen of Spain (Parliament, Madrid), King Juan Carlos I (Coleccin Real, Madrid), the previous Spanish presidents Adolfo Surez and Calvo-Sotelo (Palacio de la Moncloa, Madrid), and the Nobel prize winner Severo-Ochoa (Coleccin Masaveu, Madrid), among others. Quintero s work may be found in the following public collections in Spain: Crculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; Coleccin March Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma de Mallorca; Museo de Arte Contemporneo, Cceres; Museo Municipal, Madrid; Museo Sefard, Toledo, among others, and in the Ateneum, Finland; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachussets; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mxico City, Mxico; National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland; The Prefectural Museum, Nagasaki, Japan; Royal Bank of Scotland, Edinburgh; Saint Louis University, Boston; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. An illustrated catalogue will be available at the time of the exhibition with an essay by Francisco Calvo Serraller entitled La terra trema, an allusion to the 1948 film by Luchino Visconti. From start to finish, Daniel Quintero s pictorial work has always been dominated by this subtle agitation, which I have defined as the stylisation of catastrophe. Known for his portraits, figurative landscapes of the soul, after all, I have never known why Quintero s oeuvre has been classified as realist, this term being, for the most part, very misleading in the western world s artistic tradition, all of which is based on the imitation of nature or reality. In any case, aside from any academic controversy, Quintero s realism has always been a stylised realism, or, if you will, recalling the aesthetic disputes of the XVI century, which made a distinction between the imitare and the ritrarre, between imitating and portraying, the realism of a portrait artist, who copies nature in such an emphatic way that he not only captures its duplicate, but, above all, he does so leaving his own personal mark; that is: infusing the model represented with peremptory intensity.
Image: Francisco Leiro
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