Carlos Garaicoa brings together new and recent works comprising sculpture, installation, drawing, video and photography, which explore the themes of architecture and urbanism, politics and history, and narrative and human culture. Garaicoa's work explores the social fabric of our cities through the examination of its architecture. Ferran Garcia Sevilla presents 42 paintings in the artist's characteristically eclectic style, which draws on influences as diverse as his travels in the Middle East, philosophy, Eastern cultures, comic books and urban graffiti. The exhibition comprises works from 1981 to date and includes well-known earlier works.
Carlos Garaicoa
curated by Seán Kissane
An exhibition by one of Cuba's leading contemporary artists Carlos Garaicoa, whose
work explores the social fabric of our cities through the examination of its
architecture, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 10
June 2010. Carlos Garaicoa brings together new and recent works comprising
sculpture, installation, drawing, video and photography, which explore the themes of
architecture and urbanism, politics and history, and narrative and human culture.
Since the early 1990s Garaicoa has developed his multi-faceted practice as a means
to critique modernist utopian architecture and the collapse of 20th-century
ideologies using the city as his point of departure. Adopting the city of Havana as
his laboratory, his works are charged with provocative commentaries on issues such
as architecture's ability to alter the course of history, the failure of modernism
as a catalyst for social change and the frustration and decay of 20th-century
utopias.
Garaicoa spends time exploring cities to discover their true meaning, he often
illustrates his vision in large installations using various materials such as
crystal, wax candles and rice-paper lamps. In No Way Out, 2002, a city at night is
constructed through various scales of illuminated rice-paper lamps, while the
materials in this work reference Japan, the uniformity of the city landscape alludes
to a universal situation common to all cities worldwide. In The Crown Jewels, 2009,
miniature replicas of real-life torture centres, prisons and intelligence networks
are cast in silver and in Bend City (Red), 2007, a city is constructed entirely from
cut cardboard.
Havana, the extraordinary city where he grew up, is a particular source of
inspiration for Garaicoa's work and it is from this city's complicated development
that his preoccupation with the detritus of the cityscape developed. After the Cuban
revolution in 1959, many architectural projects and buildings were left unfinished
or abandoned, in Havana and in other Cuban cities. This juxtaposition of
architectural projects halted and abandoned, and the buildings of the colonial
period, create a narrative of a complex political history that scars the landscape.
Garaicoa refers to these as 'ruins of the future, where ruins are proclaimed before
they even get to exist'. Garaicoa addresses these collapsed buildings in his
black-and-white photographs by pairing them with a second image that reconstructs
the missing parts with coloured threads and pins. By illustrating the absence of
these once-great structures, Garaicoa emphasises the reality of these failed
utopias. His interest in urban ruins has expanded from the cities of Cuba to cities
around the world from LA to Paris to Moscow.
Garaicoa directly references iconic texts and writers through the titles of his
pieces as well as within the sculptural works themselves, particularly the concept
of the city as a symbolic space as it appears in the work of the writers Jorge Luis
Borges and Italo Calvino. In On how my brazilian library feeds itself with fragments
of a concrete reality, 2008, publications on Brazilian architecture, landscape and
culture are stacked in rows interspersed with cement blocks. The front of the
sculpture reveals the books spines while the back shows a number of bullets inserted
into the cement. In her essay for the catalogue Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy describes
this work "As if it has been attacked, the sculpture sets in motion ideas of urban
development and the weight and the wounds of progress". The use of books is repeated
in the works My personal Library Grows-up Together with My Political Principles,
2008, where architectural publications are assembled to form the framework of a city
landscape and Monsieur Haussmann, la perfection n'existe pas, 2009, where a stack of
copies of the book Paris-Haussmann are placed on a plinth with the exposed paper at
the base of the books inscribed with the plan of Place de l'Etoile in Paris. Baron
Haussmann was famous for his creation of modern Paris, with its boulevards and grand
vistas designed for the bourgeoisie of Paris representing his ideal utopian city,
but not necessarily the reality.
Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, Carlos Garaicoa trained initially as a thermodynamics
engineer before his mandatory military service. While in the army he worked as a
draughtsman, learning the skills the he would use later in his practice as an
artist. He attended the Havana Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba from 1989 to 1994.
Garaicoa has exhibited extensively around the world, recent exhibitions include the
Venice Biennale, 2009; Havana Biennale, 2009; La Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro,
2008; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2007; the Royal Ontario Museum,
Toronto, 2006, and Documenta II, Kassel, 2002. He lives and works in Havana and
Madrid.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue documenting
Garaicoa's work since 2006. It includes essays by Seán Kissane; Okwui Enwezor,
curator, writer and critic; and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Director of the Museo
Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.
Artist's Talk: Carlos Garaicoa
Wednesday 9 June 2010, 5.00pm, Lecture Room, IMMA
Garaicoa discusses his interests in urban planning and a city's architectural social
fabric. This event is followed by the exhibition preview and wine reception. Booking
is essential and can be made online at http://www.imma.ie/
Visitors are asked to note that, on the OPW's advice, the Museum is unable to
facilitate access by lift-dependent visitors, including wheelchair users, to the
First Floor Galleries in the main building until further notice. The Museum greatly
regrets this inconvenience. The Ground Floor Galleries, the New Galleries and IMMA's
café and bookshop remain accessible to all visitors.
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Ferran Garcia Sevilla
The exhibition is curated by Enrique Juncosa
An exhibition by Ferran Garcia Sevilla, a leading Spanish artist whose career has
embraced many of the most influential art movements of the past 40 years, opens to
the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Thursday 10 June 2010. Ferran Garcia
Sevilla presents 42 paintings in the artist’s characteristically eclectic style,
which draws on influences as diverse as his travels in the Middle East, philosophy,
Eastern cultures, comic books and urban graffiti. The exhibition comprises works
from 1981 to date and includes well-known earlier works, alongside a group of more
recent, previously unseen pieces, all illustrating the extraordinary visual richness
of Garcia Sevilla’s work.
The earlier works in the exhibition date from the 1980s, when Garcia Sevilla was one
of the principal proponents of the so-called return to painting. This followed a
period as an outstanding figure in the vibrant Catalan Conceptual Art scene centred
on Barcelona, where he had settled from Palma de Majorca in 1969. Paintings such as
Ruc series, created after a trip to Nepal in 1986, brought Garcia Sevilla great
international acclaim, as part of an explosion of Spanish art on the international
scene, which also included artists such as Juan Mũnoz, Cristina Iglesias, José Maria
Sicilia and Miquel Barceló. During the 1980s he showed regularly throughout Europe
and beyond, with solo show in Spain, France, the UK and Japan. He participated in
the Venice Biennale in 1986, in Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987 and in ROSC 1988,
which took place in number of locations around Dublin, including the Royal Hospital
Kilmainham now the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Works from this period such as the celebrated Deus series from 1981 demonstrate the
artist’s interest in exotic cultures and mythologies, while their execution, with
rapid brush strokes and splashes and drips, suggest the immediacy of primitive
rituals. The Ruc paintings show a further development of these mythic or symbolic
forms in a more graphic style and include what the artist himself has described as
some of his most powerful images. Always controversial, he also began to introduce,
sometimes self-mocking, phrases into his paintings, such as “If you discover the
secret I’m sure you’ll get depressed” in Muca 17.
Towards the end of the 1980s Garcia Sevilla works take on a more three-dimensional
form incorporating everyday objects, including books, shoes and light bulbs. His use
of floor tiles in the Mosaico series refers directly to the work of the famous
Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who used broken ceramics in, for example, his design
for Parc Güell. The early 1990s sees the introduction of still further new imagery
in the form of coloured discs, hands, feet and arrow motifs in the Sama series from
1990, while the many works that make up the Xa series from 1995 contain primarily
black and red forms reminiscent of scaffolding or of the iron grilles used in
19th-century balconies in Barcelona.
Towards the end of the 1990s, in series such as Tepe, Garcia Sevilla’s work becomes
more introverted, featuring drips, intertwining and superimposed lines, dots and
nets. While these motifs suggest balloons, gun shots, fireworks and comets as well
as force-fields, graphs and atmospheric phenomena, they may also simply be results
of the properties of paint as a material. In some cases, he exaggerates the dripping
effect further by rotating his canvases. These works were the last to be seen for
some time and marked a move from the narrative to the lyrical in which specific
references are abandoned.
In 1998 Garcia Sevilla stopped exhibiting in solo exhibitions, alienated by what he
saw as an overly-commercialised art scene. He continued, however to create work with
the same vigour as before and works began to emerge again in a solo show in
Barcelona in 2007. In the Moll series from 2008, for example, the dot has become the
predominant element, seemingly referring to notions such as the dissolution of
reality or the disintegration of matter. Sometimes they are spread over the expanse
of the painting; on other occasions, they form constellations and molecular chains.
Born in Palma de Majorca in 1949, Ferran Garcia Sevilla lives and works in
Barcelona. Major international exhibitions include Foundation Cartier, Paris, 1997;
IVAM, Valencia, 1998; Malmo Konsthall, 1998; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia
Sofía, Madrid, 2001; and more recently exhibitions at Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona,
2007, and Galería Fúcares, Madrid, 2008.
The exhibition is co-produced by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Patio
Herreriano, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Espanol, Valladolid, Spain, where it will be
shown from 2 October 2010 to 9 January 2011.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Enrique
Juncosa; Dan Cameron, Visual Arts Director of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts
Centre; Cristina Fontaneda Berthet, Director, Patio Herreriano; Greg Hilty,
Curatorial Director, Lisson Gallery, London; Seán Kissane, Head of Exhibitions at
IMMA; Kevin Power, writer and curator, and John Yau, poet and critic.
The exhibition is supported by Institut Ramon which promotes Catalan language and
culture internationally.
Image: Carlos Garaicoa, No way out, 2002, installation of wood table, wire, rice paper,
light, 140 x 330 x 330 cm, Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le
Moulin, Photo by Ela Bialkowska
For further information and images please contact Monica Cullinane or Patrice Molloy
at Tel: +353 1 612 9900; Email: press@imma.ie
Opening 10 June 2010
Irish Museum of Modern Art
Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin
Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday: 10.00am - 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am - 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon - 5.30pm
Mondays: Closed
Admission is free