Abigail Lazkoz: Plasticidad maladaptativa (Maladaptive Plasticity)
Lucia Koch: La tempertatura del aire (Air Temperature)
October 8, 2015–February 7, 2016
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
C. Saldaña s/n
09003 Burgos
contacta [at] cabdeburgos.com
Abigail Lazkoz: Plasticidad maladaptativa
In Plasticidad maladaptativa, Abigail Lazkoz shows a series of large-format drawings with a three-dimensional purpose that interacts with the exhibition room.
Having settled in New York in 2003, and with a wide international reputation, the Basque artist Abigail Lazkoz (b. 1972, Bilbao) brings her project Plasticidad maladaptativa to the CAB. The large-format black-and-white drawings, which are her most characteristic feature, stick out from the walls; she sometimes presents them stacked in the middle of the room while making three-dimensional objects interact with a series of other objects and sculptures. By means of this formula, Lazkoz invites us to reflect on recurrent concepts in her work: imbalance, belonging, agreement, disagreement, and the individual or the other’s gaze.
In neurology, plasticity is understood as the creative variable by which the physiological processes of neurons favour the transformation of functions, problem and solution, and cures for organisms. It can sometimes happen that plasticity produces wrong, dysfunctional results, known in medical terms as maladaptative plasticity. The exhibition at the CAB has been planned as a “maladaptative” game of counterpoints, stimuli and answers that have visual art topics as a starting point. The idea is to reclaim the more sensory aspects of the expanded drawing technique with which the artist has been working for 15 years.
In effect, throughout her whole career, Abigail Lazkoz has studied the idea of drawing in the form of a space-time appropriation, one enlarged via a narrative full of sequences and episodes and strengthened by means of straight lines and geometrical shapes, the results completely devoid of gestural elements.
Combining a tragic ingredient with a gloomy atmosphere, her drawings are linked to traditional Japanese and Mexican engravers, to some Romantic, Expressionist and Surrealist artists, and to more recent creators such as the filmmaker Tim Burton or the illustrator Charles Burns.
From a visual clarity achieved with very few visual art elements, her drawings always contain reflections of her social and political reality, with the firm conviction that works of art have to stimulate both the senses and the intellect at the same time, and that the creative act corresponds with the effort undertaken by the artist to explain the world to herself and, in doing so, find her place in it.
Since 2000, Abigail Lazkoz has participated in various solo and group exhibitions at national and international levels. Her work has been on shown at the Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, the Centre de Art La Panera de Lleida, the Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, the MUSAC in León, the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, the Artium in Vitoria, and La Casa Encendida in Madrid, as well as at the MOMA in New York, the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest, and the Museo Nacional Honestino Guimaraes in Brazil, among others.
Lucia Koch: La temperature del aire
Lucia Koch modifies the way the rooms at the CAB are perceived by presenting silk curtains, light games and chromatic transitions.
The Brazilian artist Lucia Koch (b. 1966, Porto Alegre) uses architecture, light and perception to plan her interventions in different spaces by using translucent materials, filters and perforated panels. By interacting with the viewers, her works manage to modify the usual coordinates of the room, creating a tension between the outside and the inside and challenging the limitations of the spaces themselves.
Koch makes use of the spatial dimensions and goes deeper into light perception and effect, subtly altering it by means of elements that transform the surfaces of the walls, turning them into part of the exhibition place.
In her project for the CAB, the artist uses six large silk curtains of different colour intensity to create a succession of translucent layers of chromatic transitions that can be passed through by the viewer. Thus, she establishes a dialogue between the room and the viewer that conveys the idea of being in a new context.
Together with this installation, Koch exhibits some video works in which light is also an essential element. The first one, entitled Cachoeira, stems from a wonderful, lucid souvenir from her childhood in which light and water dance together in a colourful fountain. The video installation consists of three simultaneous image projections showing the fountain at dawn, a detail of the steps next to it with some light-coloured flights, and a technician turning on the mechanism.
The second piece, Night Fever, is a single-channel high-definition video project from 2010. It belongs to a larger series called “Fundos,” in which the artist distorts the scales and material characteristics of the original receptacle where the film has been recorded. This way, she shows how photography can modify our perception of reality.
Lucia Koch has had solo exhibitions in Brazil, Spain (La Casa Encendida in Madrid), the United States, Peru and New Zealand, among other countries. She has also taken part in biennials such as Pontevedra (2000), Mercosur (1999 and 2005), Istambul (2003), Göteborg (2005), São Paulo (2006), the first Americas Biennial (2010), and the Aichi Triennale (2010). She has also participated in group exhibitions in centers such as the Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Siena (Italy).
