If the mountain won´t come to Miami, then Miami must go to the Mountain | November 2020

A group show with

María Isabel Arango, Gala Knörr, Alice Quaresma and Alex Valls

If the mountain won’t come to Miami, is the first group presentation by La Pera Projects, and serves as our special homage to Miami Art Week, which takes place every year at the beginning of December. Following David Hockney’s message of hope for the second lockdown in Europe: 'remember, they can't cancel the autumn either', this is our way to celebrate the awaited Miami art fair week getaway. The presentation brings together the works by four female artists with established trajectories whom we have followed or collaborated with over the years. The title has been taken by an ellipsis of the eponymous phrase, coined by philosopher Francis Bacon, and first included in his ‘Essays on Religious meditations’ in 1597.

These works are fresh from the artists’ studios, a series made specifically for La Pera, and all of them part of a special collaboration for our Collectors Circle. We are grateful to have these four consolidated artistic positions as part of our first group presentation. Please visit our website for full information on these artists.

María Isabel Arango (b.1979, Medellín, Colombia) lives and works in Medellín.

María Isabel Arango presents ‘FURIES’ series, a reading of Maya Angelou’s poem “And Still I Rise” that sets her words against images of domestic goddesses, turning the tables on men, as agents of female justice. Arango retouches found images and papers with gouache and acrylic following the artist's main interest to interrogate and reformulate established relationships between history, memory, evidence, and information. In her practice, Arango combines different formats – books, text, and performance – in an endless exploration of the possibilities of paper.

Gala Knörr (b. 1984 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) lives and works between Vitoria-Gasteiz and Marbella.

The works presented by Gala Knörr belong to her ongoing series of ‘outraged blondes’ inspired by the online culture and mimetic representation, exploring the hierarchy of meaning that an image acquires in the viral realm of the internet, through a contemporary lens and its consequent recontextualization. Knörr utilizes the iconography found in the pop culture narratives that millennials grew up with, to portray a generation’s unrest and uncertainty in the era of late-stage capitalism from a satirical angle.

Alice Quaresma (b.1985 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in New York.

In her Earthquake series, Alice Quaresma continues with her experimentation with the physicality of the photograph. By overlapping, painting, and drawing lines over her own photo archive, she seeks to reveal the paper's fragility and limitation. In her process, she lets materials like acrylic paint, gouache, pencil, and tape take the foreground. Her work deals with the condition of memory to find a sense of belonging. Images of her hometown Rio de Janeiro are combined here with photographs from California, as a way to build a bridge between memory and identity.

Alex Valls (b.1988 Miami, USA) lives and works in New York and Miami.

Alex Valls is a multimedia artist with a focus on found objects, installations, and sculptural work. The subject of her recent sculptures derives from environmental and cultural sentiments representing the shifting realities of our landscape. In the past, she has collected detritus and re-purposed them into sculptural compositions, with final objects functioning as modern-day geological fragments. Lately, her main focus has shifted to mastering a singular material, clay. Using the earthly rock material becomes a grounding and spiritual experience. Each of her works has its own distinguishing character reacting to the fusion of nature and the man-made.