Alejandra de Argos by Elena Cué

EXHIBITIONS

  • A Question Of Dimension. Contemporary Drawing
    Whenever  we come across a line, what we see might well be some kind of barrier or boundary dividing one space from one or more others. However, if we think beyond it as that enough to breach it, a whole world of possibilities opens up  before us. When we walk the line, the boundaries disappear and another unexplored, unexpected path opens up. Walk The Line: drawing through in contemporary art is a stroll through a collection of artworks dedicated to the delineation of a segment, its texture and its trail. If a line indeed symbolizes the most primitive of artistic expressions, the suite of wor...
  • Marlene Dumas at the Beyeler Foundation
    Author: Marina Valcárcel
    Art Historian
     
                 
      This little journey begins on a wall. As dusk falls, so begins a dialogue between that wall and a window, a transparent, vertical frame that reflects in the Swiss meadows outside and surrounding the Beyeler Foundation, all fresh, serene, rose-tinted; set against the electrical charge of a horizontal canvas turned into a muted scream depicting the Wailing Wall. It’s Ernst Beyeler and Renzo Piano in the company of Marlene Dumas. One of those rare moments for meditation: architecture resting its hand on the s...
  • Doris Salcedo: Art as a Scar
    Author: Marina Valcárcel
    Art Historian
     
           
    "Literature is writing from the heart, not the head." Great literature is written from the edge. So V.S Naipaul’s father advised his son, recently arrived at Oxford and before he became who he is today, one of the world’s greatest writers and Nobel Prize for Literature 2001. Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, Colombia -1958) does exactly this; She sculpts from her heart, her innerness, herself. She is a narrator of pain, the pain of people broken by the unexplained absence of a loved one, by the crude outlines of wounds left by...
  • Genesis by Sebastião Salgado.
    Author: Marina Valcárcel
    Art historian
     
           
      
    Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Gen 1, 2-3)   CaixaForum Madrid is currently exhibiting 245 polaroids from the Genesis series by Sebastião Salgado (born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1944) until May 4 — an exhibition which serves as a testimony to one of world’s most relevant contemporary photographers. He was awarded the prestigious Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes award in 1998 and during his career he has wo...
  • Frank O. Gehry: Architecture In motion.
     
    "The nerve pathways are something fixed, finished, unchanged. Everything may die, nothing rebirthed " Santiago Ramón y Cajal.   Frank O. Gehry in front of a blank page. The terrifying moment of creation. Feeling afraid, waiting for inspiration, stalled by emptiness. Nights of uncertainty. Conceiving an idea: suffering and ecstasy. We are our brains. The mind is the result of dialogue between each of our hundred billion neurons. How would the impulsive lines of ink appear, led by the right hemisphere of the brain, where Gehry began to dance on paper in one long, winding mo...
  • White. Fernando Manso.
     Author: Elena Cué
       
    Air, fog, mist...  An Apollonian veil that covers everything with an Olympic brightness. Within white  itself is the search for peace, purity and spirituality, evoking a world beyond reality. This is encapsulated in the pictures by Fernando Manso.   Fernando Manso (Madrid, 1961) began as a photographer in the advertising world (1990-2007). Thereafter, and until today, he developed autonomous work focusing on the organization of exhibitions and book publishing. Among other works, he has published Madrid for the Editorial Lundwerg, with a personal and previously...
  • Paula, Plensa and Poetry
    Author: Marina Valcárcel.
    Art Historian
     
           
    Paula, with her closed eyes, her low undone plait and her trunk-sized proportions, could only have come from a lime tree… She seems timeless and without origin: she might come from the Mediterranean, or perhaps she’s the sister of one of the figures constructed by the Polinesian tribe.   At the 33rd edition of the ARCO fair, this sculpture by 59-year-old Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa has powerfully stood out from the rest of the works on display. The art event has found itself this year in the middle of a war of n...
  • Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art. New York.
       Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1940-1988. MoMA. New York.
    "It's about challenging the canonical narratives with the inclusion of unexpected objects." That’s how Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, Head of Latin American Art at New York’s MoMA, understands art. And that is precisely how Brazilian artist Lygia Clark expresses her art in her current exhibition at the museum on display until August 24. The exhibition includes a number of different artistic expressions that the artist was involved in throughout her career, and which together have defined her as one of the central figures i...
  • Garage, Museum of Contemporary Art. Moscow.
       
    The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture is a non-profit organization opened in 2008 by collector Dasha Zhukova in what was once a bus station. On May 1st this year, the center changed its name to The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and relocated to Gorky Park, with the aim of becoming an international point of reference in contemporary art. “Do It Moscow” is the center’s first exhibition since the move. In this exhibition, the museum becomes an interactive space: a total of 80 artists from all over the world have provided the initial concept for their work together with instruc...
  • Dries Van Noten. Inspirations. Paris.
    Contributed by: Maira Herrero, 
    MA in Philosophy.  
          
    Is fashion art? “That’s the question of the century for our profession”. That’s Dries Van Noten’s response to Pamela Golbin’s interview question. Golbin is the Head of Fashion and Fabrics at the Museum and curator of the exhibition, and the publication of the interview marks the opening of Inspirations at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.  On display at the exhibition is the innovative body of work by Dries Van Noten: the way he treats and repurposes fabric, the richness of his embroidery and his daring and un...
  • Henri Matisse. The cut-outs. Tate Modern de Londres.
       
    London’s Tate Modern is currently dedicating 14 rooms to the most idiosyncratic works of one of the 20th century’s French geniuses, Henri Matisse — his famous paper cut-outs.   In 1941 his health suffered a great blow and he became wheelchair-bound, but this did not stop his great creative spirit from expressing itself. He focused his creativity on a new language which he called, “painting with scissors” — he didn’t see this as stopping painting, rather a continuation of his creativity and art.            This new visual language consisted of pieces of cut-out paper painted...
  • Contributor: Maira Herrero, 
    MA in Philosophy.
           
    My first encounter with the fascinating world of 47-year-old Copenhagen-born Ólafur Elíasson was over a decade ago, in October 2003 in London’s Tate Modern. I found myself before an incredible installation that took up the entire entrance of the museum (Turbine Hall). I was greatly taken aback: light, colour and sound enveloped me so intensely that I actually thought I was seeing a real twilight sun in front of me. Reality and fiction started merging in my head, flinging me and the other visitors in the hall into a wh...
  • Fernando Manso, "Rusted Light".
      
    Madrid’s Galería Caylus is for the first time hosting a photography exhibition by a Spanish photographer, Lux Oxidada (Rusted Light) by Fernando Manso (born in Madrid in 1961) — rust and light being the two distinct elements which form the common thread running through the photographs.   Fernando Manso, in this exhibition, is essentially immortalizing select moments that he has managed to capture when certain specific conditions — stipulated by himself — were met, something which at times has made him wait an incredibly long time for the exact moment to present itself.   Other phot...
  • Jake and Dinos Chapman at the Serpentin Gallery.
       Jake y Dinos Chapman. Foto:A de Argos  
    The Chapman brothers’ “Come and See” exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the meaning of art and its countless ramifications. The Chapmans are part of the Young British Artists group, and a large part of their work is inspired by the Old Master Francisco de Goya. The artists’ desire to recreate Goya’s “flat” paintings in three dimensions is evident among the work on display.                         These photos show Goya’s etching on the right, and the related Chapman sculpture on the left. Although th...
  • Adel Abbdesamed. L'age D'or.
                  
     
    This wonderful exhibition of Adel Abdessemed, artist of Argelian origin, can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, until January 5, 2014. The exhibition opens our eyes to the violence that is present in the world. Adel’s work focuses on art as as a tool to condemn violence, and through his work he describes himself as an artist of action. This is Mathaf’s most significant project to date.   At the entrance to the museum we see La Vase Abominable, a vessel of uncommon proportions resting on a base made of bombs. A vessel and weapons: two of the first art...
  • COLOSSAL IVORYPRESS
             
       Yesterday saw the opening of a new exhibition at Madrid’s Ivorypress gallery of designer and architect Ron Arad’s work. Elena Foster is the gallery’s founder and current director, fulfilling her role admirably. The gallery’s New York garage-style space is appropriate for the scale and scope of Arad’s surprising world.
     
      The first item you see as you enter is a ping-pong table in stainless steel and bronze: the structure and design of its lines is a work of beauty in its own right. Already from this first item, the artist’s incredible technical skill is apparent....
  • Rudolf Stingel at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice.
       
    One of this year’s Venice Biennale’s most remarkable exhibitions was undoubtedly Italian artist Rudolf Stingel, held in the Palazzo Grassi. His first exhibition in the United States, which I still remember vividly, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2007. The artist had covered the walls of a room with Styrofoam coated in aluminium, and visitors were invited to physically interact with the installation by scratching parts of the aluminium coating off the wall, thereby leaving their marks on the piece with writings, drawings or scribbles. I’ve tried and fa...
  • Jeff Koons. Gazing Balls.
       
      That’s one way of describing Jeff Koons’ latest work, currently on show at the brilliant David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, New York City.
    As I walked into the white-walled gallery, I was overwhelmed by the unexpected sight: numerous life-sized Greco-Roman sculptures surrounded me in a lively, curious dance. Hercules, Aphrodite, Narcissus, Dionysius… they were all there, torn from their world of antiquity and relocated to modernity, where the concept of time simply fades away. All the sculptures are made out of pure white plaster, and each of them is holding a perfect sphere made ...