CGAC Summer Season
Mark Manders: Curculio bassos
4 July–12 October 2014
Diego Santomé: Corner Piece and Other Conflicting Spaces
20 June–26 October 2014
Juan Uslé: Dark Light
4 July–28 September 2014
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC)
Ramón del Valle Inclán 2
15703 Santiago de Compostela
T (+34) 981 546 632
cgac.prensa [at] xunta.es
Mark Manders: Curculio bassos
Curated by Javier Hontoria
Produced with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Mark Manders (b. 1968, Volkel, Netherlands) is, in essence, a sculptor and his work is infused with poetry. It all started out with his legendary Self-Portrait as a Building, which he created in 1986 when he was just 18 years old, having realized that he had ‘a certain affinity with the language of visual arts.’ All of his later works are an unceasing, open-ended variation on his first creation, where he attempts to come to an understanding of something that appears to be simple, but is, at the same time, deeply complex: the fact that the world is populated by human beings and that these human beings create objects that stay with them over the course of their lifetime. Based on this premise, Manders has created a unique and formal universe that under no circumstances ignores this vital source of inspiration which is poetry and, in the broader sense, writing—a kind of writing that does not use words, at least not always, but rather objects and shapes.
Diego Santomé: Corner Piece and Other Conflicting Spaces
Curated by Agar Ledo
The discursive strategies that provide the foundation for the work of Diego Santomé (b. 1966, Vigo, Spain) are directly linked to the concepts of utopia and failure, equilibrium and instability. In both the selection of the materials and the work process, Santomé bases his approach on subjects related to the circumstances of everyday life and their transformation, showing the possibility/impossibility of a new order leading to a balanced society. The project for the CGAC brings together a series of works—some already in existence, while others have been specifically created for this exhibition—that sum up the issues dealt with in his work over the last decade.
Juan Uslé: Dark Light
Curated by Stephan Berg
Jointly organised by Kunstmuseum Bonn and CGAC with generous support from AC/E
Since 1997 Juan Uslé (b. 1954, Santander, Spain) has been working on a series of works known as his ‘black paintings,’ which takes a central position in his oeuvre. In the 50 works that make up the series “Soñé que revelabas,” most of them done at night, Uslé carries out a highly concentrated and meditative disquisition on the structural conditions of painting and the painting process. Every brush mark on these works is charged in two different ways: On the one hand, they depict the painterly gesture and thus classify themselves as part of the tradition of self-reflective abstract painting. On the other hand, every brush mark can be regarded as the painter’s heartbeat, which turns the works into manifestations of the painter’s direct and ‘sensual’ bodily connection with his paintings.
