The Accident
I saw your eyes fixing on my answer. “YES”. It came out of a dark and unsuspected part inside me. I remembered exactly that sensation and the need to breathe pure air. To sweat and feel the…
Marina Valcárcel
“Angkor: Naturaleza y Misticismo. Borja de Madariaga.
After his photographic exhibitions on Rome, Venice… Borja de Madariaga (Madrid, 1966) exhibits at the Espacio 51 gallery in Madrid “Angkor: Naturaleza y Misticismo”. There are almost twenty photographs of various sizes, from 200×150 cm to 50×50 cm, with…
Marina Valcárcel
Alex Katz. Red Hat. Javier Lopez Gallery in Madrid.
Regarded as one of the precursors of Pop Art, the American artist Alex Katz (Brooklyn, 1927) opened last night, together with his wife Ada, the exhibition ‘Red Hat’ at the Javier López Gallery in Madrid. A painter of series,…
Marina Valcárcel
Cosmogonies. Alejandro Botubol. Espacio Valverde, Madrid.
Beyond the carriage entrance of a side street off Madrid’s Gran Via, the Espacio Valverde Gallery hangs over a light-filled courtyard, hosting, in this month of September 2014, the work of Alejandro Botubol (Cadiz, 1979) and his…
Marina Valcárcel
Ánima by Eliana Perinat: The Nature of the Landscape
Eliana Perinat presents her latest work, Ánima: an evocative body of work that reveals the hidden life of the forest through a photographic record made with motion-activated cameras. Once the images are selected and retouched, Eliana prints them on skin, bone…
Marina Valcárcel
Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance
Florence, during the first decades of the fifteenth century, was the axis around which the world turned. In among its twenty neighbourhoods with their gonfaloniers, their streets and palaces, their churches and houses, Alberti was writing his treatise “On Painting”, Masaccio had painted the Brancacci Chapel frescoes and his Holy Trinity adorned Santa Maria Novella church, Ghiberti completed the North Door of the Baptistery and Brunelleschi crowned Florence cathedral with a dome which, using never-before-seen techniques, he made to float in its enormity above the Santa Maria del Fiore apse.
Marina Valcárcel
Hieroglyphs : Shining A Light On Ancient Egypt
It must have been a dazzling sight to behold when the waters of the Nile flooded the lowlands of Ancient Egypt. The ground disappearing, the ditches filling in, villages emerging as if tiny islands and the swelling of the river setting the rhythm of time. There are some 1,000 kilometres between Aswan and the Mediterranean and covering three-quarters of this distance, Upper Egypt is a furrow hollowed into the desert.
Marina Valcárcel
Christo: Wrapping The Arc de Triomphe
It has been 62 years since a young artist, recently arrived in Paris having fled from communist Bulgaria stowed away in a train carriage, began painting sketches with the dream in mind of one day wrapping the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. That young visionary along with Jeanne-Claude Guillebon, his wife and other half in life and in art, are no longer with us, she having died in 2009
Marina Valcárcel
Sunsets by Heidi Hahn
The Fahrenheit Gallery, Valeria Aresti's beautiful Madrid art space, is currently hosting the exhibition “Some Other Sunset” by rising New York star, the painter Heidi Hahn (b. Los Angeles, 1982). It comprises a series of 7 medium-sized oil paintings and 8 drawings, each of them dominated by the silhouette of a female body. These are women lost in thought, silent and, for the most part, in a forest lit only by the sunset.
Marina Valcárcel
Van Gogh, painting from hell
London's Tate Modern is currently hosting a visit from a very different Van Gogh. The exhibition comes courtesy of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and includes a painting that seemingly brings with it the air of a Soviet billboard, a kind of propaganda, a punishment, a coldness. It is a far cry from Van Gogh's most iconic sun-soaked canvasses - no lilies, no sunflowers in vases, no wheatfields.
Marina Valcárcel
Van Eyck: An optical revolution
On 7th March 1500, Emperor Charles V was baptized at St Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, a fortnight after his birth. The verticality of the central nave, with its very subtly pointed arches shooting up into the sky, was draped in gold and silver-threaded Flemish tapestries; the Gothic stained glass windows, with their heavenly entourage, fulfilled the symbolic function of transforming the interior illumination into an other-worldly light distinct from that outside.
Marina Valcárcel
Leonardo Da Vinci ~ an infinite curiosity
On a scale of difficult to … how does one even begin to guess what was going through Leonardo da Vinci's mind on seeing a woodpecker for the first time? "Describe its tongue," the painter asks himself in one of the many little notes scribbled in the margins of a notebook ... "The tongue of a woodpecker can extend more than three times the length of its bill. When not in use, it retracts into the skull and its cartilage-like structure continues past the jaw to wrap around the bird’s head and then curve down to its nostril." In the concluding pages of his book, Walter Isaacson (New Orleans, 1952) establishes an imaginary dialogue between his reader, Leonardo and himself in which he offers us a clue: "There is no reason you actually need to know any of this. But I thought maybe that you would want to know. Just out of curiosity. Pure curiosity.”
Marina Valcárcel
Gormley at the Royal Academy: a discourse in iron
This exhibition bombards us with a storm of ideas. It is a gauntlet thrown down to us by the Royal Academy and one that Gormley takes up, with all his weapons and from all sides: with lead, steel, seawater, a little blood from his veins and a battalion of iron men, dozens of soldier Gormleys. It has been four years in the making during which time, for the positioning of each and every piece, every conceivable permutation has been tried. Also during that time, the building’s architecture has been subjected to extremes, pushing it to its very limits: walls supporting massive weights, average-sized rooms housing pieces the size of something from another world, from Gulliver’s Travels, that balloon out against the doors, against the corners, while, in the adjoining room, the floor has been turned into a pond and is flooded with water.
Marina Valcárcel
The Colosseum: Machine of Roman power
Coliseum director Dr Rosella Rea accompanies ABC Cultural on an exceptional visit through some of the recently restored, but as yet unopen to the public, areas of this prodigious monument . Back in Madrid, we consult with Pritzker prize-winning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. “You need to close your eyes to imagine this gallery ... Archaeologists have found coloured, stuccoed areas and many frescoes. We know now that the interior of the Coliseum was red. Only the exterior was light, the colour of limestone travertine. Ancient architecture was always painted in bright colours and to forget this is to veer from reality", says Dr Rea, as we walk through a gallery whose restoration began in 2012 - thanks to a €25 million funding grant from luxury brand Tod's – and, although now completed, is still absolutely out of bounds to the public.
Marina Valcárcel
An invisible image: The Tomb of the Diver
This could be the beginning of a novel: Poseidonia, 5th century BC, and tragedy befalls a family from the local aristocracy. The lifeless body of their only child, a son initiated into Orphic rites, is returned to them from the Wars of Sybaris. The mother covers her son's eyes with Poseidonia's first roses in flower, their praises sung by Virgil for their perfume and twice-yearly blooms. The mother then lays her musician son's lyre, its soundbox a turtle shell, on his breast. As dawn breaks, the father leaves the city walls to commission the most opulent of burials for his son. He seeks out the most gifted painters, those able to create the most moving scenes ..... This article pertains to the story of a burial: an element as intrinsic to the human condition as our own mortality.
Marina Valcárcel