Pedro Reyes and Remy and Veenhuizen

Pedro Reyes and Remy and Veenhuizen

Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB

Remy and Veenhuizen, Our world as a toolkit, 2015. Installation view, Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB, 2015.

March 5, 2015

Pedro Reyes: El juego de la vida
Remy and Veenhuizen: Our world as a toolkit

13 February–24 May 2015

Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
C. Saldaña s/n
09003 Burgos

www.cabdeburgos.com

Pedro Reyes
El juego de la vida 
In his work, El juego de la vida, the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes with the collaboration of the etnographer Joaquín Díaz invites us on a playful tour through the different stages in our lives.

Pedro Reyes’s work (b. 1972, Mexico City), combining sculpture, architecture, video and performance, deals with the interaction between the physical and social space. He considers art a useful tool to promote both individual and collective action to confront the human, political, and ecological crises of our times.

For his exhibition at the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, CAB, Reyes has transformed the room into a games room, a spiral-shaped board recalling the game Snakes and Ladders, with 63 squares in which a walk through the different stages of our existence is presented.

By throwing the dice in El Juego de la Vida, the participants will start moving forward and backward around the board, and the room will be playfully activated. A record player allows the participants to listen to songs that are related to these vital moments as you play, these songs have been selected taking into account the structure of the game itself.

In effect, this proposal has its own soundtrack, a double album which has been recorded by the distinguished musicologist and folklorist Joaquín Díaz, awarded the Castilla y León de las Ciencias Sociales y las Humanidades Award in 1999. Over his 50-year-career he has compiled more than 60 albums with Spanish chants and love songs.

Linked by family to Joaquín Díaz because of the Spanish exile to Mexico, Reyes spent his childhood listening to these albums so that, when the opportunity to have a show at the CAB arose, Reyes wanted to create this game as a collaboration between the two artists.

Facing social problems. Through art, the Mexican artist analyses the contradictions of modern society and proposes solutions that are at the same time simple and complex, metaphorical and functional.

Pedro Reyes’s work has been on show at some of the most important museums and galleries in the world such as the Venice Biennale, Art Bel and Documenta at Kassel.

Remy and Veenhuizen 
Our world as a toolkit
Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen arrive at the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, CAB, with a set of creations made out of old objects, full of humour and a playful attitude.

Halfway between art and industrial design, the Dutch artists Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen recontextualise thrown away materials in order to create very original works of art in which function and shape become an indivisible whole with which they invite us to reflect on our current style of life and consumption.

Using  an experimental approach, and not without humour, Remy and Veenhuizen have developed a system of principles based on saving, simplicity and responsibility; by reusing objects that are meant to be unusable and by giving everyday objects singular philosophical aesthetics.

The chest of drawers, the rag chair and the milk-bottle lamp are some of the most well-known designs by these artists whose works are part of collections such as the MoMA in New York, the Central Museum in Utrecht, the LACMA in Los Angeles, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam or the Die Neue Sammlung in Munich, among others.

These creations are functional, aesthetic, symbolic and playful at the same time. They start with physical features, history and the meaning of the reused object and they are then planned and developed depending on the physical and architectural characteristics of the room in which they will be exhibited. “We transform the familiar and incorporate some circumstances into it, making a world in itself out of the material with which we work. This allows us to create our own limits in terms of design,” explain the artists.

Remy and Veenhuizen work with the rhythm of shapes, colours and textures to transmit, feelings, stories and ideas with a poetic inspiration that surprise and move us. Heirs of Droog Design, which attracted the attention of international critics with an exhibition at the Furniture Fair in Milan at the beginning of the ’90s, this pair of Dutch artists have spread the language of contemporary design and opened doors to a new generation of creators who now explore the use of new materials and create products and spaces that become one with the individual at a personal level. They often start form natural shapes, they make the viewer to rethink his or her relationship with the objects surrounding him or her or even with the world.

With the collaboration of The Embassy of The Netherlands.

 

Pedro Reyes and Remy and Veenhuizen at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
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