ARCOmadrid 2025

Booth 9C14

Ifema, Pav. 9

5 – 9 March

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils

André Romão

Carlos Bunga

Daniel Gustav Cramer

Gabriela Albergaria

Ignasi Aballí

Joana Escoval

João Louro

Susanne S. D. Themlitz

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS is participating in ARCOmadrid 2025 and we are delighted to share a selection of recent and new works by Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, André Romão, Carlos Bunga, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Gabriela Albergaria, Ignasi Aballí, Joana Escoval, João Louro, and Susanne S. D. Themlitz.

ALEXANDRE FARTO AKA VHILS

 

 

Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils (b. 1987) has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with non-conventional tools and techniques. He began interacting with the urban environment through the practice of graffiti in the early 2000s. Peeling back the layers of our material culture like a modern-day urban archaeologist, Vhils reflects on the impact of urbanity, development and global homogenisation on landscapes and people’s identities. Destroying to create, he delivers powerful and poetic visual statements from materials the city rejects, humanising depressed areas with his poignant large-scale portraits.

 

 

_More info

In Diafragma, Alexandre Farto aka Vhils’ last exhibition at the gallery, the artist uses light and shadow as its central theme. Created with tubular lamps, an element embedded in the urban daily life which connects us to the fast-paced rhythm of modern cities, the new series exposes the layers of life in the metropolis. Speed, connectivity, and the movement of individuals within cities are all driven by energy. The lack of access to electricity is also what perpetuates inequality.

 

Online viewing room

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘Strates Urbaine’ project, developed for the Orly metro station in Paris, was the leitmotiv for a broad body of work around the use and possibilities of traditional Portuguese tiles. The 34 metre-long mosaic that Vhils is presenting in Paris and for which the artist worked more than 4 years, allowed him to develop stencilled, embossed and carved techniques which translate his characteristic gesture and figures into this artisanal medium.

ANDRÉ ROMÃO

 

André Romão (1984, Lisbon) explores ideas of transformation, mutation, and fluidity primarily through sculpture and poetry, shaping his work into a dynamic exploration of these concepts.

Romão was the recipient of the Prémio EDP Novos Artistas in 2007 and BES Revelação in 2013. He was a resident artist at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2010), MACRO, Rome (2014) and Gasworks, London (2020), among others.

Romão’s work is represented in collections such as Gulbenkian Foundation, EDP foundation, MACE – Coleção António Cachola, FRAC Franche-Comté, among others.

 

_More info

 

 

These works continue the exploration in the field of sculpture of notions of horizontality, fluidity and metamorphoses. Lately, complementary ideas of vitalism and melancholy also come into play to explore flow and animation.

Referencing the history of art, religion, philosophy, literature and pop culture, the artist creates powerful allegories which ultimately call on us to reflect upon the contributions of modernism — in particular surrealism and psychoanalysis, which explore the world of the subconscious, dreams, and the irrational — and their relation to humanism (was it not the hybrid nature of the world which created modernism?). In a society which is firmly dominated by mechanisation, in which technology is integrated with — and sometimes even mimics — nature itself, Romão reminds us of the importance of taking stock of humanity, as well as our interactions with the non- human — or more-than-human — world, in the light of a new global perspective, one that is driven by scientific progress and technological innovation.

 

Taking emotion and intuition as building blocks, his dream-like figures and landscapes often occupy a blurry field between the literary and the natural realms.

 

Solo exhibition

 

André Romão

Calor

Curated by Inês Grosso

 

MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology

 

Check the Online viewing room 

7 July – 7 October 2024

CARLOS BUNGA

 

Carlos Bunga (b. 1976 Porto) lives and works near Barcelona. He creates process-oriented works in various formats: sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, video, and above all in situ installations, that refer to and intervene in their immediate architectural surroundings.

After winning the Spanish Critics Association Award for Best Artistic Project at ARCOmadrid last year, this year’s selection continues Bunga’s formal language and his highly developed degree of aesthetic care and delicacy. Presenting all new sculptures and paintings, the conceptual complexity derived from the inter-relationship between doing and undoing, between unmaking and remaking, between the micro and the macro, between investigation and conclusion find here full expression.

 

_More info

“This exhibition is a moment of pause, of silence, an invitation to reflect. Some will see it as mourning, because it’s true that misfortunes come our way in droves, from natural to man-made cataclysms, all of which are our responsibility, of course. There’s a growing, agonisingfeeling that the end is approaching. But hasn’t it always been like this? According to Jorge Luis Borges, Frank Kermode and other authors dedicated to reviewing eschatological literature, all times are bad, they all predict and predicted the end of times. The difference, according to Carlos Bunga, perhaps lies in the more and more naturalised exercise of self-censorship, of the fear of being judged, of turning away from dialogue in favour of retreating into silence. A terrible silence, pregnant with anguish and loud, unexpectedly loud.”  – Agnaldo Farias

 

 

Discover the Online Viewing Room of Silence, Carlos Bunga’s solo exhibition at Galeria Vera Cortês, 2024

DANIEL BLAUFUKS

 

 

Daniel Blaufuks has worked on the relationship between public and private memory, a constant theme of inquiry in his work as a visual artist, pursued chiefly through photography and video and presented in installations, books and films. In 2007, he published Sob Céus Estranhos (Tinta-da-china) – based on his film Under Strange Skies from 2002 – which earned him the award for best photography book of the year in the international category at PhotoEspaña.

 

His films – “expanded photographs” – have been shown at various film festivals and his latest works examine the resistance to German occupation in Brittany and colonialism in São Tomé and Príncipe.

 

 

_More info

“This diary is the perfect example of the work Daniel Blaufuks undertakes in all of his prior or parallel photographic and video works. In simple, horizontally placed sheets of A4 paper, the artist numbers the days/years as they pass by. Onto them he glues instant photographs (rarely more than one or two per page) and a few cut-outs from newspapers and magazines, adding handwritten or stamped phrases (often his own or quotations without any reference to the author or source) in the languages he is most fluent in (English, German, Portuguese and French). There is rarely any explanatory logic to the relationship between these different elements – their autonomy is only constrained by the visual composition, and each “day” imposes a pronounced poetic freedom in which the power of the written word often underpins the repetitive ordinariness of the images.”

“We created time and immediately felt hemmed in and devoured by it. Memory is a betrayal of time. We have always tried, without success, to escape it, to negate its erosive influence – a Sisyphean task in which Blaufuks, who exposes to the world the weight of the myriad epochs and memories (family, personal, historical, political, cultural, …) he carries, participates.”

– João Pinharanda, in the curatorial text of the days are numbered, 2024

 

Solo exhibition

 

Daniel Blaufuks

the days are numbered

Curated by João Pinharanda

 

MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology

 

Check the Online viewing room 

7 July – 7 October 2024

DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER

 

Daniel Gustav Cramer’s artistic practice revolves around a multifaceted exploration of the interplay between image, sound, and text. Delving into abstract forms and the relationships between humanity, nature, and the unseen, Daniel Gustav Cramer’s work invites viewers to contemplate the varied dimensions of existence. His creative process unfolds organically, often sparked by incidental moments or extensive research, resulting in works that offer nuanced narratives and evoke profound reflections on the world around us.

 

_More info

Spending time inside these landscapes—the exact locations I stood twenty years ago—surrounded by the same trees, I sensed that my time had moved on. I have changed, and the world around me has changed in so many ways. What I found—the forest—was both foreign and familiar. A fragile place, somehow outside of time and yet at the very center of life itself.

Daniel’s first exhibition at the gallery in 2007 featured photographs from the Woodland series (2002 to 2009)—a project of landscape photographs captured in locations both near and far. In the summer of 2024, marking twenty-two years since Woodland began, he returned to the forests.

GABRIELA ALBERGARIA

 

Gabriela Albergaria’s work involves one territory: Nature. A nature manipulated, planted, transported, set in hierarchy, catalogued, studied, felt and recalled through the ongoing exploration of gardens in photography, drawing and sculpture. The artist views gardens as elaborated constructs, representational systems and descriptive mechanisms that epitomize a set of fictional beliefs that are employed to represent the natural world. Gardens are also environments dedicated to leisure and study, cultural and social processes that produce a historical understanding of what is knowledge and what is pleasure.

More generally, the images of gardens and plant species employed by the artist are used as devices to reveal processes of cultural change through which visions of nature are produced. Mediated by representation systems they generate different versions of what we see as landscape—itself a complex system of material structures and visual hierarchies, cultural constructs that define the framing of our visual field.

 

_More info

Nature in repair. Processes of recovery. Transformation of nature.

 

These drawings are made from images I took in the Redwoods forest park in California, where the notion of time is felt through a backdrop of centuries-old living and dead trees, creating a stunning fairytale atmosphere.

 

In 2012, I took a road trip up the coast from San Francisco, driving into every pocket of secondary forest. These secondary forests form part of national and state forests and are thus mostly protected by the state.

 

I was interested in witnessing this idea of secondary forest, now free from human exploitation. How does nature recover after being subjected to exploitation processes?

 

I photographed these apocalyptic scenes of fallen giants and in the studio started a series of drawings in which dimension is an essential element. The play between the macro and the micro; the amplification of details towards abstraction, until you almost lose contact with visual reality.

IGNASI ABALLÍ

 

Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Barcelona, city where he lives and works. All of Ignasi Aballí’s work draws a challenge on the viewer’s perception. At the base of his work is the interest in showing that there are many things that we do not perceive with our eyes but that equally affect us. And that, just because we do not see them, does not mean that they are not there, but rather that these build on the semantic tension between what we see and what we do not: transparent or opaque images, which do not “show” anything, if anything they hide… The same happens with texts that only show fragments, partial explanations, abstractions.

 

 

_More info

In ictu oculi at the CAAC, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo focuses on two key concepts: silence and reflections on painting. Silence in Aballi’s work is not simply the absence of sound but an active presence that encourages deep contemplation and introspection. Through empty spaces, monochromatic colors, and ephemeral materials, the artist creates a dialogue with the monastic history and the tradition of spiritual contemplation of the Carthusian monastery and Seville.

Solo exhibition

 

Ignasi Aballí. In ictu oculi

Curated by Geovana Ibarra

Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville

 

Check the online viewing room

6 June – 7 November 2024

“It is up to us now to walk through this exhibition, without a lens, here without the need to squint, with the filter of our Eigengrau, a shared colour code (#16161D), lightly covering the works with our own dust particles shed from our skin in contemplation. Nothing more innate than the grey of our own ash.

And if we listen to Cézanne, Ignasi Aballí is here more than ever a painter.” – Marta Azparren

Current exhibition at the gallery

 

Cinzento/Grey/Gris

 

Explore the online viewing room

23 January – 8 March 2025

JOANA ESCOVAL

 

Joana Escoval lives and works in Lisbon. Her practice circumscribes both visual and aural in the form of sculpture, collective performance-promenades, video installations, painting and printed matter.

 

The rhythm and fluidity of the elements she uses in her work are temporarily suspended in time, and will eventually follow their natural transition and transmission into other states of matter, keeping their new-found charges and vibrations from when they were objects.

 

Escoval’s practice opens up a dialogue between the physical and metaphysical, encouraging reflection on our relationship with the unseen energy fields that connect us to everything around us beyond a western point-of-view.

 

_More info

JOÃO LOURO

 

João Louro was born in 1963, in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and painting at the Ar.Co School of Visual Art. João Louro’s body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and video.

 

João Louro’s work descends from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. It draws out a topography of time, with references that are personal but mainly they are generational. With regular recourse to language as a source, as well as the written word, he seeks a review of the image in contemporary culture, starting out from a set of representations and symbols from the collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, Pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism, authors such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille and Blanchot as well as artists like Donald Judd and the ever-present Duchamp, form the  reference lexical universe  of the artist.

He was the Portuguese representative at the Venice Biennale of 2015, with the exhibition “I Will Be Your Mirror | Poems and Problems”.

 

_More info

In the series Blind Images the viewer is faced with a canvas on which the image has been blanked out, hidden beneath a coating of glossy acrylic and a glass panel that produces the effect of a mirror. At the bottom of the canvas there is a text alluding to or descriptive of the cancelled image, thus provoking different approaches to what is visible or varying perspectives through which one can consider the image; helping us to understand that the gap between words and images is not as great as that which exists between words and objects, or between culture and nature. At its origin this series has the ceaseless saturation of images we undergo nowadays. Louro states that this is due to the “erosion of the word, in which the signified ceases to coincide with the signifier…. The word is a fine skin that has lost its contents.

 

 

The relevance that Louro grants to the language that describes the image even more greatly highlights the importance of literature, poetry and cinema as analogous forms of interpreting the world in which he structures his work and the type of meanings that it suggests.

 

 

 

 

 

The texts that appear in his paintings are not storylines, but rather a manner of showing the importance of the concept of presence that language suggests to us and is so difficult to pin down. His works avoid a unidirectional interpretation and are the product of their interaction with a surrounding, which helps to enrich the possible readings of his works.

 

 

SUSANNE S. D. THEMLITZ

 

Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968) lives and works in Cologne and Lisbon. She studied Visual Arts Studies between 1987 and 1995 at Ar.Co. (Lisbon), the Royal College of Art (London) and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

 

In Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s work, drawing is a practice intimately connected to the development of idiosyncratic mechanisms between thought and imagination, therefore, it’s a medium that allows her to explore and feed processes of oddity. Each drawing assumes a cut with the exterior. The off-field doesn’t exist. Everything is inside, in this inner world, with its singular meteorology and with the unique capacity of gathering forces, energies and vibrations that distinguish it as a peculiar reality.

 

_ More info

Solo exhibition

 

Susanne S. D. Themlitz

The Language of Silent Things

Curated by Miguel Fernández-Cid

 

MARCO – Museu de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo

 

Visit the online viewing room

8 November 2024 – 13 April 2025