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8/11/2005

Vanessa Beecroft

CAC Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Malaga

Vanessa Beecroft’s exhibition at CAC Málaga, entitled VB53, is her first solo show in Spain. It features a dozen photographs and a video based on a performance this Italian artist made with a group of 21 women in the Giardino dell'Orticultura in Florence, Italy, in June 2004. The show, which will run from 9 November 2005 to 15 January 2006 and occupies two exhibition areas at the CAC centre, is sponsored by Financiera y Minera.

For the first time in Spain, CAC Málaga hosts a show by Vanessa Beecroft, VB53, featuring a series of photographs of women who are completely silent, doing nothing, giving away nothing of their personal histories. These images, clearly of classical inspiration, evoking religious icons, transmit a powerful sensation of evanescence and timelessness.

These women wear just sandals, wigs and false eyelashes. They are portrayed in the photographs as just another artistic element, far removed from the reality that surrounds them. This distancing from context is further reinforced by the accessories the women wear, which are, to quote Vanessa Beecroft herself, designed “to make them look more like a drawing.” But the peculiarity of this nude work is that the models (not all of them professionals) pose as if they were dressed, challenging viewers to the point where they are the ones that feel observed and intimidated.

In each of these pieces, which call to mind the figure of Mary Magdalene, the colour of the naked female bodies is seen in juxtaposition to that of the earth, and its texture, further heightening the sense of ambiguity and provocation that the images transmit.

Focusing on the human body and operating in the space between art and life, the artist Vanessa Beecroft (Genoa, Italy, 1969), who lives and works in New York, subverts photography, painting, sculpture and videoart. Conceptually, although her works are recorded on photography and video supports, Beecroft is closer to painting than to other artistic media.

The art centres and museums where Vanessa Beecroft has shown her work include the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Wacoal Art Centre, Tokyo; the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Site Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven.


JAUME PLENSA
7 October 2005 - 8 January 2006

Duality is one of the constants in Plensa's creative process, in which he combines opposites (the material and the immaterial, presence and absence, reason and spirit) with the aim of eliciting emotions of the viewer, appealing to sensorial factors and to memory. His work is highly elaborate and personal, and the spectator has to interact with the pieces, touch them, enter them or walk around them.

Plensa's work, occupying two exhibit spaces at CAC Málaga, focuses on the human dimension and its relation to its surroundings, often questioning the role of art in society and the position of the artist. By the same token, the close relationship between the human body and 'the whole' is defined with great clarity, as the artist himself explains in the text to the exhibition catalogue.

This Catalan sculptor transforms the physical space into an extension of mental concepts. Through his work, he carries out an exercise in memory. A series of ideas and concepts, often dense and involved, fill the artist's intricate and personal work, whose result is volumetric and radiant. The artist uses varied materials in his works, such as resin, polyester, steel, iron, water, glass or nylon, not because of the innate characteristics of these supports, but on the basis of a need to attain different modulations for his ideas and thus obtain a differentiated spatial form for each idea. Language is also a fundamental element for Plensa, as he conceives of it as a "container of memory". By the same token, literature constitutes one of the main sources of inspiration for his work, as reflected in The Song of Songs and The Three Graces.

Silence and light are likewise intrinsic and fundamental aspects of his pieces, both elements comprising recurring motifs that unify the exhibition. The Wispern installation is one of the most spectacular works in the exhibit, consisting of 44 cymbals with engraved phrases and words - excerpts from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell - upon which droplets of water are constantly dripping, producing a whispering sound whose aim is to transport the spectator to a world of silence. On this occasion, at the CAC Málaga exhibit, this installation will be shown in its largest format to date, more cymbals having been added to the piece since its initial creation in 1998.

Image: Vanessa Beecroft, VB53

CAC Málaga
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