#POSTMODERNISM | April and May 2023
#POSTMODERNISM
A curatorial project by Victoria Rios
DANIEL DOBARCO
ROSA AGUILAR
MIQUEL BONETA "K1WY"
GABRIEL COCA
SOFÍA GONZÁLEZ
GVIIIE
OCTAVI SERRA
#POSTMODERNISM is born under the most blinding light, the type that does not allow you to see but also one that you cannot help but look at. It is a new wave of creators or, rather, a new way of creating. The search for beauty and a perfect composition is behind us and we welcome the process. Art integrates life in its most experiential form, creation arises like a phoenix from the ashes of all that was once stipulated squinting at the academy. #POSTMODERNISM is the answer to the new paths of creation. Postmodernity does not feed on longings and searches, it feeds on experience, on what shapes ourselves and that we are slowly but surely integrating into our ways of thinking. Postmodernity breaks with everything that is established and opens the way of new paths to be followed.
We look to the past and rewrite everything that is discordant with our perception of the present. Every rupture supposes a conflict in every form: in the word, the critique, in the redoing; it becomes creation. #POSTMODERNISM is freedom of thought in its plastic form, which comes from the most powerful form of thought of all: the idea.
STATEMENT
Postmodernism is a process of cultural transformation, where, in many cases, preexistent structures are not aligned with the vitality of contemporary culture and, thus, artistic creation. Beyond canonical rules and nurtured with diverse backgrounds, new languages appear within the social realities. Urban culture, digital speed, and new ways of seeing the world modify everything that was once instituted. This project investigates these new dialectics. It redefines, generates processes and reflects aesthetically from the present day, and it does so through the work of various artists, where the origin, the technique and the creative impulse stem from different realities.
Daniel Dobarco (Castellón, 1988) lives and works in Valencia
"Starting from the creation of a parallel reality, Dobarco's underworld is populated with magical beings, fantasy and stories. Videogames and the most epic sagas of fantastic reading take on a new dimension and meaning in each of his works and the most powerful aesthetic ends up revealing to us the contemporaneity that surrounds all of his work.
Characters with a tough appearance but from which a familiar sensitivity and affection emerges, among trolls, flowers and hugs, we find hidden some of his concerns and many of us." -Victoria Rios
Daniel holds a BA in Fine Arts and an MA in Artistic Production from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain. He is currently the recipient of the Producción Hàbitat artístic Castelló grant (2023) in residence at GlogauAir in Berlin. His work has been exhibited in many galleries around Spain, including Tuesday to Friday, Valencia (2021 y 2023) and Galería Fran Reus, Palma de Mallorca (2023).
Rosa Aguilar (Granada, 1996), lives and works in Madrid
"Through light and matter, her sinuous chromatic range shapes a narrative full of flashes of life. Her way of creating the world invades us at first glance. Experiences, stories and nods to everyday life are generating the mysterious story of each of her canvases." -Victoria Rios
Rosa works with the aesthetics related to Cottagecore and 20th-century European naturalist movements, looking for the ludic and universal within the natural environment. In her work, the different elements must be considered for their archetypal character as well as the relation between the sign and the object, just like Magritte did in "Les mots et les images", 1929.Cottagecore is an aesthetic current clearly represented on social networks such as Tumblr, TikTok, or Instagram, where a lifestyle focused on simplicity and harmony with nature is shown as a romantic interpretation of Western agricultural life.
Rosa holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Sevilla (2019). After graduating, she became a resident at Fundación Antonio Gala. She has been awarded scholarships for residences at Real Academia de Historia y Arte de San Quirce as well as WE COLLECT studios. She has won prizes such as the XLVIII Concurso Internacional de Pintura de Paisajes de Alcalá de Guadaíra, the V Certamen de Artistas Emergentes de la Universidad Loyola y, and the IX Certamen UNIA de Pintura. Her work can be found in collections such as Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson and Casa de Indias. She has had individual exhibitions at Di Gallery and soon she will be having a solo show at The Curators Room in Barcelona. She has participated in fairs such as Estampa 2022 and UVNT 2023.
K1WY, Miquel Boneta, (Tremp 1998), lives and works in Barcelona
"From the freedom that creation gives you on the street, through the digital world and towards the studio.
Street, lots of street have made Miquel Boneta, better known by “K1WY”, his signature within the field of graffiti, have passed the screen in the search of continuing to have even more creative freedom.
Hours of study, experimentation, humor and an enormous love for plastic arts, give rise to fresh, natural work that is free of ties. K1WY teaches us that restlessness must break with everything that is established and that going beyond the norm means going far beyond what is predetermined." -Victoria Rios
K1WY are the four capital letters that form his graffiti signature; he is a multidisciplinary artist who is somewhat very difficult to label. Nowadays, he spends most of his time painting and tattooing. Since a very young age, he has had an interest in expressing his ideas on the street in a free way, breaking the limits that paper imposes and taking advantage of the polemic and social rejection that graffiti implies. In his artistic practice, K1WY is self-taught, but he has a background in Animation and VFX.
Endless hours of study, experimentation, humor, and an enormous love for the fine arts, give rise to fresh, natural work that is free of ties. K1WY teaches us that restlessness must break with everything that is established and that going beyond the norm means going far beyond what is predetermined.
Gabriel Coca (Pamplona, 1989), lives and works in San Sebastián, Spain
"Three deep breaths set the pattern for the observer looking at a work by Gabriel Coca for the first time; his painting reaches us in the form of oxygen that invades us with peace, calm, restlessness.
An unconditional love for plastic arts and an eternal love for beauty, a work full of light, mysticism and silence."
-Victoria Rios
His practice focuses on the research of the properties of paint and constitutes a reflection on the possibilities of the medium itself. For Coca, painting is a gesture, an act carried out by the impulse of a desire to see something that does not yet exist. He makes visible a force that appears through the form, composed of matter, color, and line. Painting for him is discovering something new, unveiling a reality. The pictorial space is created by a set of multiple layers of paint that overlap and deny or affirm each other. The artist sees the painting as a place, an image of a stopped moment, a presence that seems to say something and says nothing; something silent and mystical.
Gabriel graduated in Art and Design from the Escola Massana and has a Master's degree in painting from the UPV/EHU. He has participated in residencies at the Arteleku production center (San Sebastián) and at the Huarte Center (Navarra). He has been a beneficiary of production aid for plastic and visual arts from the Government of Navarra in 2021. His work has been exhibited in centers and galleries such as Centro Huarte, SC Gallery (Bilbao), Galería Lumbreras (Bilbao), Basauri Cultural Center (Bizkaia) or Sala Parés (Barcelona), also at fairs such as FIG Bilbao and UVNT. His work is part of collections such as DKV or Agefred.
Sofía González (Seville, 1994) lives and works in Seville, Spain
"Sofía Gonzalez has acquired in her painting, the slow charisma of the firm step. Conscious and calm, her work allows us to glimpse the dedication and philosophy of her process, where the idea and fiction of the three-dimensional come to life in the two-dimensional, patterns, vanishing points and lines, here is a creator of perspectives, spaces and worlds." - Victoria Rios
Through painting, she investigates links that connect with drawing, with the spatial representation in the two-dimensional plane, and with those ways of doing things that are atavistic in the human being. Sofía proposes an image typology in which proximity to objects, fonts, or repeating patterns is constant, starting from a simplified structure in order to eliminate accessory elements that hinder its reading.
Sofía is a graduate of Fine Arts from the University of Seville. She has participated in group exhibitions such as Salón-Teatro: La cabeza antes que el ojo in Birimbao Gallery (Seville, 2019), The secret cabinet in César Sastre Gallery (Seville, 2021), A Persistence of Painting in the Municipal Museum of Faro (2019) or Etcétera, etcetera at Yusto Giner Gallery (Marbella-Madrid 2022). She recently had her first solo exhibition at Berlin Gallery in Seville.
GVIIIE (Madrid, 1989), lives and works in Madrid, Spain
"With the reflective theory of an artist who loves painting, one faces the work of GVIIIE in a ritual of mourning, like two people facing life or death for their honor. A challenging painting that invokes the intellect and seeks relief in the victory of thought and reflection. His technique invokes the past and his themes represent the perfect communion of context, aesthetics and meaning, the most authentic of #postmodernities." - Victoria Rios
Guille is a self-taught artist, he began painting on walls during high school, and even took part in the Independent Art Fair in Madrid. He left creation for a long period of time until he reappeared under the pseudonym Guille Joder as a cartoonist, collaborating in Mongolia magazine and in various fanzines. In 2017 he resumed street mural activity with notable intensity. In 2018 he had his first individual exhibition, Naturalezas Vivas with La Causa gallery who currently represents him and has recently presented his work at different fairs such as Urvanity or Estampa.
During the last years of activity, he has participated in various international festivals, such as Invasion Fest in Plasencia and Fabrika Tibilisi in Georgia, continuing with his activity as an independent urban artist, which earned his recognition in the beginning. He has developed his studio practice by pursuing a Master's Degree in Painting from the University of the Basque Country (2021).
Octavi Serra (Girona, 1990), lives and works in Barcelona.
"A demiurge of ideas, a creator of new meanings, Octavi Serra has spent years generating impressive images in the collective imagination. An artist who redefines concepts by playing with objects and context. His work shows a clear "artivist" position that reflects some of the concerns and annoyances of current generations regarding current social events and that seek to generate reflection in the viewer." - Victoria Rios
Artist, designer, and photographer Serra focuses on capturing modern life's ironies, topics, and frustrations. His work is a sign of our times and a reaction to dissatisfaction within the current social landscape. Serra builds conceptual installations that currently mock culture and seriously question the status quo: each image portrays a message about some kind of sociopolitical issue. Whether it's surveillance, greed, corruption, environmental destruction, selfishness, or technology... no stone is left unturned. His work has been published in major design and art publications such as MoMA, Designboom, and Ignant and has been exhibited internationally in countries such as Portugal, Mexico, Norway, and Israel. Over the years, his work has been recognized with awards, including Laus, Contemporáneos, DME Awards, and KREAS. He currently leads the edition of the newspaper "The post-traumatic," a self-published editorial critical of the conventional media, distributed regularly in Spain, France, Germany, Australia, and Mexico.
NATURALEZA MUERTA (STILL LIFE)
These days I have dedicated myself to placing artificial flowers in different public spaces. Due to the inability to live in this world aligned with the possibilities that nature offers us, I have succumbed to the charms of the artificial to propose solutions. If no flowers grow, go to the nearest bazaar, buy some artificial ones, and tape them where nothing grows anymore—artificial solutions for natural problems.
If you have any questions or are interested in the works by this artist, please contact Blanca or Clara at info@laperaprojects.art