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5/3/2009

Two exhibitions

Galeria Helga de Alvear, Madrid

Angela Bulloch
Smoked, Formed & Quartered

Angela Bulloch in her second exhibition at Galería Helga de Alvear presents a new body of work conceived as a synthesis of light, colour, movement, sound and a whole plethora of disparate references.

Born in Canada, Bulloch has had one-person shows at Ara Pacis in Rome (2007), The Power Plant in Toronto (2006) and Hamburguer Banhof in Berlin (2005) and has had work on view in significant group shows at the Guggenheim New York (2008) and the Serpentine Gallery in London (2006). She was also shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997.

Bulloch conceives her work as “open”, which is to say it is ready to accept a wide spectrum of interpretations from the spectator. The language co-opts current technology, what is readily being used in our homes and workplaces or perhaps in hotels, clubs or theatrical spectacles. In this regard, one can speak of a line of work that can be traced back to minimal art in the sense that it shifts between the literalness of the object of industrial production and references associated with it.

During the 1990s Bulloch made all-over installations combining objects culled from diverse sources and with differing functions to create a total environment. To the fore were influences from, and references to, science fiction and futurism which, for the artist, take the place of the technological utopias of modernism. Furthermore, literature and film (Kubrick, Kurosawa or Antonioni) are constant sources of inspiration for her work.

One of her best known series, Pixel Box, was seen at her last show here at Galería Helga de Alvear in 2005. Coupling concepts of light and colour, object and subject, referents and their objectual representation, these pixel boxes could be viewed as sculptures or as elements in a binary code chain. Nonetheless we ought to bear in mind that they are not real codes but sculptures referring back to these concepts.

In this current exhibition Angela Bulloch features two new works: Smoked Spheres which is in turn based on the work by Bridget Riley from 1964 called White Discs II. In the latter work a series of black circles are depicted against the white surface of the canvas to produce an overall image difficult for the beholder to grasp. They are arranged in such a way that one never quite gets a hold on it, though it is obvious that the rhythm is carefully constructed by the artist. What Angela Bulloch is interested in is precisely this duality or contradiction between the apparent casualness of the emplacement and the evident intentionality. On this occasion what she does is to borrow the structure and repeat it on the walls with luminous spheres of smoked glass. It is a kind of transposition of the original that strives to uncover the secret of its layout, to unearth its understated and elusive order.

She will also be presenting the series Night Skies is grounded in computer generated images that reproduce a panorama of our galaxy from a viewpoint far from Earth. Once again, the object is indebted to technological solutions (leds) that manage to recreate a perspective that is impossible, for the moment. They are a simulation, a sculpture, a point of view over our planet that no human has ever had, at least not yet.

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Jorge Queiroz

Jorge Queiroz is having his first solo exhibition in Spain at Galería Helga de Alvear. Queiroz works almost exclusively in the field of drawing, in which he has created a uniquely personal world with a highly recognisable signature style.

In his work, the artist composes a particular cosmogony that weds the grotesque and the surrealist in scenes of horror and irony. In these works a quantity of elements are combined and interrelated to create an overall whole replete with references. Queiroz’s work is posited almost like a filter through which to look at and understand reality from another optic. The patent narrative thrust of his drawings has no apparent beginning or end yet there is an undeniable development throughout a surface full of information.

Figures that transmute into plants then become pathways that in turn transform into spaces which are ultimately folded in perspective and lost in the infinite. Queiroz’s drawings are weighted with an enormous density of motifs and his ability to use empty space and fill the sheet of paper is surprising. One can recognise a whole plethora of references, whether direct citations or influences. At first sight one discovers silhouettes that bring Goya or Piranesi to mind but also Mike Kelly or the grandmasters of abstraction. Jorge Queiroz’s works seem to be suffused with a certain visual promiscuity that induces the beholder to contemplate them for hours in search of new details and discoveries. Each one is a window onto the unique world of the artist.

The choice of drawing as his primary form of expression suits his uniquely personal style, being produced in the intimacy of the studio without any other intercession than the artist himself and his hand.
Technically speaking, he flaunts a reckless freedom in mixing watercolour with ink and with gouache in an amalgam that also moulds itself to the referenced motifs. His drawings are an accumulation of different layers of material and of information that are stacked up until forming a unitary whole with infinite readings.

Born in Lisbon in 1966, Jorge Queiroz currently lives and works in Berlin. He has exhibited at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, at the Serralves Foundation in Porto and he has also had work on show at the 4th Berlin Biennale and the 50th Venice Biennale.

Image: Angela Bulloch, Smoked Spheres

Galería Helga de Alvear
Calle Doctor Fourquet, 12 Madrid
Hours: 11:00 am - 2:00 pm & 4:30 - 8:30 pm

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