ARCOmadrid 2022
21 – 27 February 2022
Stand 9C14 | Ifema Pav. 9, Madrid
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils
Carlos Bunga
Daniel Gustav Cramer
Joana Escoval
John Wood and Paul Harrison
José Pedro Croft
Susanne S. D. Themlitz
GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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Portuguese visual 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 nonconventional tools and techniques, establishing symbolic reflections on identity, the relationship of interdependence between people and the surrounding environment, and life in contemporary urban societies, as well as the impact of development, the passage of time, and material transformation.
Artist bio
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Atomizer Series #11, 2021. Advertising posters, spray paint, glue, crystal epoxy. 150 x 120 cm. Unique
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Unearth Series #01, 2021. Hand-carved advertising posters. 175 x 127 cm. Unique
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GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Splitter Series #02, 2021. Laser-engraved from demolished building (brick, plaster, concrete, paint). 23,5 x 21,5 x 16,5 cm. Unique
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Through the employment of mass-produced materials, Carlos Bunga establishes a dialogue with the existing architectural spaces resulting in ephemeral structures creating a double effect: to rethink our experience in relation with the space itself, as well as arousing the transient and delicate nature of urban structures.
Photography and video have served Bunga to document his creative processes. So have materials in other occasions, such as the piles of painter’s tape formed from the leftovers of his paintings, or in this case, the cardboard used to protect the studio floor. These boards were used during the creation of the sculptures made for the exhibition Terra Ferma at Glynn Vivian Gallery (Swansea, 2021).
The process is the movement from the abstract to the concrete, without being its final result. Studio Floor reflects the creative moment: the cardboard panels used as protection for the floor reflect the artist’s colour palette as well as the materials he regularly uses, but he does it in an absolutely spontaneous and casual way, each mark is the result of a gesture or a movement.
In response to these works Bunga has constructed a series of new sculptural works set in dialogue with the landscape paintings from the Glynn Vivian Gallery collection – the form, colour, content of each painting and each sculpture have been selected and made in dialogue with one another. Therefore, each of these works has an absence implicit.
GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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Carlos Bunga, Studio Floor, 2021. Plaster, latex, tape and glue on cardboard. 200 x 119 x 3 cm. Unique
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Carlos Bunga, Untitled #7 (in collaboration with Glynn Vivian Gallery Collection), 2021. Mixed media. 52 x 29 x 14 cm. Unique
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Carlos Bunga, Untitled #3 (in collaboration with Glynn Vivian Gallery Collection), 2021. Mixed media. 42 x 12 x 12 cm. Unique
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Carlos Bunga, Construcción pictórica vertical. Naturaleza 5, 2021. Plants, latex and glue on wood and cardboard. 200 x 150 x 7,5 cm. Unique
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Each of Daniel Gustav Cramer’s portraits opens a gate to the invisible. They connect with absent individuals the artist has met, be it for a moment – the blink of an eye, of an epiphany – or over the course of several weeks or months. Cramer’s portraits connect with other absent individuals, those who inhabit a different realm: actors, writers and historical figures. Cramer is also interested in the idea of memory and the infinite, which he explores via books and archives as medium and subject.
Artist bio
Daniel Gustav Cramer, Untitled (after C.M.), 2021. 2 C-prints, 120.3 × 363 cm
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GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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In 1893, Claude Monet built a water garden on his land in Giverny by diverting parts of the stream of the nearby river Epte to create an Asianinfluenced landscape with a pond at its centre. He planted several non-native flowers, trees and shrubs, including water-lilies in the pond itself. He constructed a wooden bridge framing the pond. In 1912, Claude Monet was diagnosed with cataracts, an eye disease that gradually worsens, for which he refused to undergo surgery. Over time, his sight grew blurred and his colour vision deteriorated. Nevertheless, he continued to sit in his garden in Giverny with brushes, easel and canvas, painting the pond, the reflections, the japanese bridge and the water lilies.
In 1980, renovation began on a small pond in front of Nemichi Shrine, near Itadtori village, Japan. The pond’s name: Namonaki Ike – ‘unnamed pond’. In the years to follow, blanket weeds took hold, polluting its water. In 1990, a group of villagers, led by the owner of nearby Itadori Flower Park, grouped together to clean Namonaki Ike and plant water-lilies. Several villagers donated koi fish. The water, stemming from volcanic Mount Koga nearby, is naturally filtered and crystal clear. The bed of the pond is made of fine white quartz sand. Twenty five years passed. Finally, images of the pond appeared on Japanese social media platforms and created an immediate viral sensation for its resemblance to Claude Monet’s Nympheas paintings, created a hundred years earlier.
Daniel Gustav Cramer, Tentomi, 2021. C-print, text. 62 × 98.3 cm
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Daniel Gustav Cramer, Tentomi, 2021 (detail). C-print, text. 62 × 98.3 cm
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Joana Escoval’s works are passages, open-ended invisible paths. 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 sculptures. Whichever form they’re found in (mostly metals compounded or purified, mixed as alloys or mixed with other materials), these elements are charged with energies that unite beings and objects, the material and the spiritual. Escoval blurs the borders between what we are so used to calling “nature” and “culture,” and emphasises instead how everything is entangled and connected, seeing “nature” and its cycles beyond a western point-of-view—and most of all seeing it as something that is not separate from us.
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Joana Escoval, It dreams that it’s always waking II, 2022. Fusion of metals (brass), glass, air. 118 x 55 x 86 cm approx. Unique
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Joana Escoval, Even the best mixture of clay, sand, and rock will become sterile if it is not nourished, 2022. Earth, water, fire, air. 43 x 36 x 15 cm. Unique
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GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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Joana Escoval’s new solo exhibition WIND DREAMS is currently on view at the gallery.
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Exhibition view: WIND DREAMS, Joana Escoval, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
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Exhibition view: WIND DREAMS, Joana Escoval, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
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Through the accumulation of layers and plans, José Pedro Croft opens a set of possibilities of the surrounding, challenging the vision and perception of the space as well as our way to interact with and within it.
Artist bio
GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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José Pedro Croft, Untitled, 2020. Graphite, gouache, varnish and Indian ink on paper. 129 x 146,5 cm. Unique
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José Pedro Croft, Untitled, 2020. Graphite, gouache, varnish and Indian ink on paper. 113 x 149,5 cm. Unique
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Through the surrealizing narrative imagery of the figures inhabitating her pieces, Susanne S.D. Themlitz lets us dive into a world full of oneirism, fantasy, which is strange yet familiar.
Artist bio
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Monumoment Corner, 2021/2022. Print on blueback affiche paper, framed drawings, wooden stand, ceramic, plaster, sand. 116 x 196 cm. Installation view, ARCOmadrid 2022
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Susanne S. D. Themlitz. GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Flutuava, 2020. Oil and graphite on canvas. 100 x 140 cm. Unique
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Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Um olho aberto, o outro não, 2020. Oil and graphite on canvas. 105 x 200 cm. Unique
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John Wood (b.1969, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (b.1966, Wolverhampton) make things that move and things that don’t, things that are flat and things that are not, things that are mildly amusing and things that are definitely not. They make works that form a kind of reference manual for how to do, make, build, or draw things that you probably never want to do, make, build, or draw. They do it for you. Even though you don’t need them to. This attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of the everyday, started in 1993 after they met at art college.
Artists bio
GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, booth 9C14, ARCOmadrid 2022
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John Wood and Paul Harrison, 3 paint trays, 2019. Paint trays, oil paint. 70 x 30 x 40 cm (each). Unique
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John Wood and Paul Harrison, A painting made of thirty three letters, 2021. Oil paint on plywood panel. 91 x 61 cm. Unique
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John Wood and Paul Harrison, Lean against a wall, 2021. Oil paint on plywood panel. 91 x 61 cm. Unique
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Current exhibition at the gallery:
WIND DREAMS
Joana Escoval
28 January – 12 March 2022
Online Viewing Room
