Current exhibitions
Pello Irazu: Una oportunidad cada día
Gregorio Méndez: Pulso
Burgos, marca de fábrica
September 28, 2012–January 13, 2013
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
C. Saldaña s/n, 09003 Burgos
T 947 256 550 / F 947 256 553
contacta [at] cabdeburgos.com
Pello Irazu
Una oportunidad cada día
Pello Irazu (b. 1963, Andoain, Guipúzcoa) is one of the members of the generation that renewed Spanish sculpture during the 1980s. Throughout his career, he has developed an artistic language of his very own, taking artistic movements such as constructivism, minimalism and pop art as a starting point to then go deeper into the relationship between humankind and space, with the colossal work of Jorge Oteiza as a reference.
Space, indeed, is not only the domain for thoughtful work loaded with a subtle lyricism and sensuality, but also a part of the artist’s approach in itself. Irazu moves between sculpture and photography, painting and drawings that seem to acquire depth, and relief, that seem to expand and to possess a sort of sculptural tridimensionality.
Una oportunidad cada día (a reference to the wishes, doubts and ambitious nature of creative work) is the title of a piece included in general works belonging to 2011, as well as some pieces that were conceived before (such as the aluminium sculpture Noli me tangere, 2009) together with some works specifically created for the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB.
Gregorio Méndez
Pulso
Gregorio Méndez (b. 1960, Burgos) started painting during the ’70s, a discipline that he would combine with etching, drawing, performance, happenings and installation up to the year 2000. The show he brings to the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB presents an overview of his work as a video artist since 1990, when he started to work with video.
His exhibition begins with Cayendo – Falling (2006), a series of drawings showing people leaping into the void, which are directly inspired by September 11th. These drawings are related to 180 Frames, 180 Lies (2008) shown in the same room: It is the manipulation of a supposedly amateur video showing the impact of the second plane on the Twin Towers, from which the image of the plane has been eliminated frame by frame.
The message in Ledscapes (2006) opposes the one conveyed in the first room: It is a less heavy aesthetic game in which Méndez exploits the contrast between a series of videos filmed in different spaces: landscapes, domestic images, his own workshop…and sentences taken from films which appear on an LED screen built into the center of each of the monitors.
The conflict between nature and technological and mechanised civilisation is presented in the next room with the series Arbor ex machina, the beauty of the trees is highlighted by means of moving and symmetrically doubled images that create a surprisingly aesthetic effect.
At the end of the exhibition three works study the relationship between humankind and spirituality: Cavalcanti rap (a performance based on Boccaccio), Madonna (triptych-shaped projections dealing with the role of women in the Catholic religion and their representation in Western art) and GodDog (an animated palindrome). As a perfect end, Composición abstracta, Jennifer López (2001) sees the viewer off, a playful ingredient and a cross between abstract painting and digital methods.
Burgos, marca de fábrica
Works of art are often able to convey their essence in the spaces we inhabit, to offer us a new look at and new ideas about our surroundings. At the same time, what triggers the creative work, the thoughts, the reflections and the obsessions that provoke it sometimes originate in an inspiring space, when the work itself is conceived for the place where it will be shown, for example, or when it stems from a fruitful dialogue with a physical atmosphere, with a concrete place.
This dialogue is a primary ingredient in the show Burgos, Marca de Fábrica that gathers work together at the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB that mainly belongs to the Caja de Burgos Art Collection. It has been created and produced to a large extent in the city of River Arlanzón coinciding with the artists’ visits to this city. The show offers us the possibility of enjoying the variety of expressions that the streets and landscape of Burgos have sparked off in these artists.
This exhibition, a new show of the Caja de Burgos Art Collection, gathers the differing, original, and unique vision of an heterogeneous group of artists that identified themselves with Burgos and its idiosyncrasies at one time, and thus offer us a fresh way of contemplating the everyday perspectives that protect us.
