Reviews

(PART 3)

In the heart of San Felipe, a northern Bogotá neighbourhood in process of gentrification, there is a building where more than 20 artists from all over the world work, talk and coexist. Each one has their own workshop and does part in the activities of the curricular program, which includes encounters with curators, theorists, leaders of indigenous communities, among others.

Founded by curator José Roca in 2016 The Flora School residence turned Bogotá into a meeting point for a diverse group of people interested in art. The reasons why artists choose this residence are diverse, although everyone agrees that the experience in Bogota represents an important moment in their career.

Here are some of the residents featured in this first review.

The second half of the year has arrived and the distances between what was and what is, is usually reduced to moments of constant revision that allow us to sketch what will be, or at least form an expectation of it. For Venezuelan art, half of the year has meant the possibility of witnessing the dialogue between complexity and typical contradiction of a convulsed country, in which past and future are interrelated to speak in the present tense.

By Valentina Gutiérrez Turbay.

(PART 1)

In the heart of San Felipe, a northern Bogotá neighbourhood in process of gentrification, there is a building where more than 20 artists from all over the world work, talk and coexist. Each one has his own workshop and does part of the activities of the curricular program, which includes encounters with curators, theorists, and leaders of indigenous communities among others. Founded by curator José Roca in 2016 The Flora School residence turned Bogotá into a meeting point for a diverse group of people interested in art. The reasons why artists choose this residence are many, although everyone agrees that the experience in Bogota represents an important moment in their career. Here are some of the 2018 residents:

In the Dresden Series created for this exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum, Sebastian Spreng moves away from the lyrical paintings of the past that were inspired by the ethereal beauty of nature to a subject of serious historical import.  The Allied bombing of one of Europe’s most culturally significant and beautiful Baroque cities in February 1945 is a dark chapter in the story of war, and one that would be repeated in many horrific ways to this day.  To capture the essence of its tragedies, Spreng explores new media and new technologies to produce 60 digital prints created on his IPAD directly on aluminum.  Using photographs and computer manipulation of line and color that appear like ghostly shadows to scar painterly surfaces, Spreng turns to his lifelong love of music and poetry to inspire the many moods of war – from dark destruction to rays of light.  Each work is named a Canto, a reference to divisions in poetry and music derived from the Latin for song, and for him inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and his cantos about purgatory.  It is a perfect way for the artist to present the works as verses, approaching the series through mood.  They are also odes to remembrance and hope for the future.

At Loyola 32, in Villa Crespo (Argentina), over the ground of Hache graphite in powder, resin, papers and objects of coal universe. Upon entering the gallery a series of absorbent black panels make a wall. However, the wall is false, by means of a curve, the "gray mole" structure, as described by Max Gómez Canle, curator of the exhibition, deposited in the adjoining room where Horizonte (Horizon), the second work of Elena Loson, is presented as a Constellation of objects in a monochrome palette. Un muro más allá (A wall beyond) inaugurated on Tuesday 19^th at Hache Gallery in Buenos Aires.

Review by: Carlos Zevallos Trigoso

A sensation that is perceived today in Lima, especially among young artists, is that the activities of the art market do not offer enough stability and that the work necessary to build a personal career is crossed by factors that are not very transparent. It is in this context that initiatives are launched by young people, some of them artists, where they design for themselves and their peers some dynamics that allow them to relate to the market while maintaining greater control and with expectations much greater than that of commercial circulation. Two significant examples of this are Maria and Crisis galleries, projects with less than two years of activities that are directed towards the future with clear readings of the context and their needs.

In 2014, the non-profit organization Wildlife Conservation Society invited twelve Latin American artists to enter the Bahuaja Sonene Reserve located in the south east of Peru. The idea of ​​the program was, through artistic expression, to make known the reservation to the region so that awareness is generated. Bahuaja Sonene is one of the six national parks with the most biodiversity on the planet. Among the poets, musicians, chefs and visual artists invited to represent this great landscape was Roberto Huarcaya, a Peruvian psychologist, photographer and artist who has been experimenting with the notion of territory for several years from his series of panoramas Campos de Batalla (Battlefields).

Juan Cruz Pedroni write about ‘El cuerpo de una Colección’, the new permanent exhibition by Fundacion Klemm, curated by Federico Baeza and Guadalupe Chirotarrab.

The notion of similarity seems to have a clear reference in the context of the exhibition: it refers to the use of photography as a reproduction, a faithful record of monuments and works. The connotations of the second term are, on the other hand, less evident, although they seem to point to the instants (or is it, perhaps, of places?) In which the alluded resemblance stops.

It is a simple gesture to locate Ensayos de apertura, the exhibition by Luciana Lamothe (1975) in the coordinates of a return to order that critics have even come to celebrate. 

"Imago Mundi" is the first individual in Galería 80m2, Lima of the Argentine artist Adriana Bustos, who takes her title from the cosmographic treatise of the geographer and theologian Pierre d'Ailly, which Columbus used on his voyage of discovery.

The retrospective exhibition of an artist who traversed historical conceptualism sometimes leaves the image of a collection of muted sites, a repertoire of vacant places. 

"Fragmentaria II" brings together seven pieces from different series by the Uruguayan artist Pedro Tyler, offering a synthetic overview of his work in his second solo show in Lima.

The proposals of Daniel Boccato (Campinas, Brazil, 1991) investigate the relationship between abstraction and figuration and are based on the investigation of the different discursive forms that pose language and form, suggesting other foundations that establish a new thinking with which to challenge any constriction. All this is reflected in Centinela, his last performance and specific project for the space Studies of the old tobacco factory in Madrid, where he follows another of the constants of his production: the breaking of any convention on formats and the preferential use of materials and objects of an industrial nature.

In her recent exhibition for the gallery in Madrid, Sandra Gamarra (Lima, Peru, 1972) returns to use the concept of imposition of Western thought, channeled through the appropriation of that vision in Latin America. Nonetheless, the exploration of cultural perception and assimilation are, in a certain way, habitual subjects of study in her trajectory. For the occasion, the space plays a fundamental role for the understanding of the proposal. This, although conformed by several pieces, works as a single environment where everything dialogues within the conceptual framework.

The Main Hall of the Usina del Arte houses an imposing installation by the Argentine artist Eduardo Basualdo, which can be seen until April 22nd.

Each new intervention made by Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, Colombia, 1958) reaffirms the commitment to narrative based on historical research, usually covered in a certain revisionism, which the artist has been practicing for years, especially focusing on everything that surrounds political violence and what it generates. This is also the case of Palimpsesto, the proposal of monumental character that has developed in the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid and with which it pays tribute to the victims of one of the most dramatic faces of immigration, those who left their lives risking it blindly in the Mediterranean Sea.

Under the care of guest curator Emma Lavigne, the 14th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art brings together a breadth of artists who echo the instability of these times. 

Marinho sculpts and molds to seek not only the shape that emerges between his hands but also the emptiness yielded—that which we may not see so easily, but that is as real as what we do see, and as much part of the work.

The exhibition De Nature en Sculpture shows how nature is perceived by contemporary artists—mainly, as source of inspiration and means of expression. Nature, whether reproduced or in its actual state, is, here, turned into sculpture, and vice versa. Engaging our emotions, the artists summon nature in all of its forms and reveal through their visions its many facets (peaceful, turbulent, sublime, and vexing).

Surreptitious Stripes, an exhibition of work by Francisco Masó (Havana, 1988), was held from July 20 to August 19 at the Connect Now Room of the Arts Connection Foundation in Miami.

Candría’s images suggest the space in a distance not only geographic, but also temporal. On the basis of a series of images taken in Iceland and California, the artist reconstructs the phases of a journey that wanders in memory and imagination.

The show Slow Motion features the most important outgrowths of the creative universe of an artist that invites the viewer to take a new look at the art of movement.