International Art News

From June 21 to July 30,2011 – Galeria Senda
Oleg Dou’s work develops and pushes to the limit the idea of the human body as an object of subversion, distortion and other mutations that undermine their integrity.In an interview with Zoom Magazine, the young photographer said: “I have a passion for a human face. I use artificial nature of a digital photography as a tool to reach the point between opposites such as alive and dead, attractive and disturbing, beautiful and ugly.”

Oleg Dou uses digital photography to portray fictional characters and inquire about the concepts of beauty, perfection and innocence. His images, which refer to the video game universe, kitsch or fashion, are disturbing and calming at the same time, undoubtedly sick but peculiarly youthful and alive. With his extremely careful work, Dou encourages these ambivalent emotions, seeking to agitate the viewer’s sense of what is a normal appearance

Gallery Hours

From rhe 8rd of April to the 10th of July 2011 – Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
The French Painter Gustave Courbet rocked the art world in the 19th century. Through his brush, reality entered painting: Realism was born.

With the aim of tracing his footsteps in this country, the MNAC is exhibiting a selection of his most outstanding works, most of which are being shown in Spain for the first time. The exhibition reveals Courbet’s influence on Catalan painting in the period, most of all through the work of Ramon Martí Alsina, the man responsible for the renewal of painting and who introduced Realism to the Spanish art scene.

It is an ambitious exhibition, produced by the MNAC, that invites the public to gain greater in-depth knowledge of Realism and at the same time discover its precedents and its legacy, in a show that deliberately goes beyond the temporal limits of this movement:
from the Spanish Golden Age, with paintings by Murillo, Ribera and Velázquez, to contemporary art, through the work of Antoni Tàpies, one of the most universal Catalan artists.

Museum Hours

From the 20 January to 19 February 2011 – Fundació Suñol
White Whispers, the Absent Library is the resulting work from the first edition of the post-production grant awarded to Antònia del Río by the Fundació Suñol, in collaboration with the Master’s in Artistic Productions and Research (PAIR) from the University of Barcelona.

The Majorcan artist exhibits an installation that alludes to the mechanisms of transmission and loss of knowledge, using the representation of a nearly imperceptible library as a metaphor for the storehouse of memory—memory as a construction of discourse, knowledge and thought, as a means to preserve lived memories and experiences and as a resource for avoiding the loss of knowledge that each change of generation entails. It is an intimist work on books, reading and their comprehension, the disappeared knowledge from books that no longer exist and the traces they have left us behind. The piece is accompanied by a documentation space where spectators can consult the readings that were the basis for giving shape and content to the project.

The Fundació Suñol’s Nivell Zero hosts different avant-garde artistic productions with its own projects and also in collaboration with other institutions. In a line of strong commitment to training young artists, in 2009 the foundation signed an agreement with the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona to award a grant to a graduate student in Art and Intermedia Contexts (PAIR Master’s). The award is for €6,000, and it provides the artist with a studio at the Fundació Suñol for six months to conceptualize and undertake the project. The foundation then assesses the project’s suitability to be exhibited at Nivell Zero, as was the case with Antònia del Río for having succeeded in creating an optimal work.

Museum Hours

7 July 2010 to 6 February 2011 – The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Carbon paper, sugar, carpets, tea glasses… Latifa Echakhch (El Khnansa, Morocco, 1974) may use everyday materials in her works, but the result is by no means ordinary. Spanish playing cards, tartrazine (a food colouring used as a cheap substitute for saffron) and flagpoles are the three central elements in an intervention at the Capella MACBA produced for what is the first exhibition in Spain by an artist whose work has been shown at the Tate Modern (London) and the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. It was in March that the Peruvian artist Armando Andrade Tudela (Lima, 1975) fired the opening shots as the Capella MACBA embarked on a new line of action aimed at presenting works especially produced for this exhibition space. Now, Latifa Echakhch writes the second chapter with an installation (really, three installations, but fused into a single project) that takes its inspiration from waves of North African immigrants, fleeing poverty or taking part in warlike expeditions, that have settled in Spain, over the centuries. However, the work also forms a dialogue with Echakhch’s own origins. Though she was born in Morocco, the French artist lives between Paris and Martigny (Switzerland). It is precisely ambiguities of meaning, with all their implicit contradiction, paradox and derision, that form the basis for Echakhch’s non-conformist strategy.

Museum Hours