Itinerarios (Itineraries)
Until 20 April 2014
Botín Foundation
Pedrueca 1,
39003 Santander
Spain
T +34 942 226 072
info [at] fundacionbotin.org
The Botín Foundation’s exhibition calendar kicked off with the Itinerarios (Itineraries) show featuring works by artists who were awarded one of the Foundation’s Visual Arts Grants in its 20th annual grant programme.
Spanish artists Rubén Grilo, Clara Montoya, Juan Luis Moraza, Guillermo Paneque, Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez and Carlos Valverde, alongside foreign artists Ella Littwitz (b. 1982; Haifa, Israel) and Nuno Cera (b. 1972; Beja, Portugal) display their work in the new edition of Itinerarios which will be open to the public until 20 April at the Botín Foundation’s exhibition venue in Santander, north Spain.
A jury consisting of David Bestué, Curro González, Miguel von Hafe and Elena Vozmediano chose the winning artists from among the 873 applications made to the 20th Annual Visual Arts Grants.
Over the years this group exhibition has come to be the crowning event of the grant awards, exhibiting the works produced during this period and providing a close-up panorama of today’s most cutting-edge artistic practice. The catalogue, including a text written by Miguel von Hafe, reviews the projects of each of the artists.
Nuno Cera (b. 1972; Beja, Portugal)
Having explored a variety of architectural contexts related to European Modernism, his project Sinfonía del desconocido (Symphony of the Unknown) plays with psychological aspects and with uncharted spatial qualities which are expressed in a three-screen video work.
Ella Littwitz (b. 1982; Haifa, Israel)
Habit/at and Lily explores the artist’s dual nationality, the memory of modernism as part of political and social thought, as well as interconnected contemporaneity. She displays a series of sculptures, as well as a video filmed inside a Second World War bunker as it was being demolished from the outside.
Ruben Grilo (b. 1981, Lugo)
El cuadro y el buzón (The Painting and the Letter Box) is the result of research carried out in various places in England and the USA into the figure of Samuel Slater and the origins of American conceptual art in the 1960s. The project has led, moreover, to a number of works in which, with the objective of reconciling research work and artistic work, accentuate the relationships between both contexts and endeavour to reveal a degree of reciprocity while avoiding furnishing a lineal interpretation of the project.
Clara Montoya (b. 1974, Madrid)
Superficie (Surface) aims to continue the line of work the artist embarked upon at the BBK in Berlin, where she had access to a variety of means of production which allowed her to produce her sculptural work. She exhibits three different, but interconnected, pieces. These pieces, Sisters and Quantum Sister 1 and 2, simultaneously allude to three-dimensional Euclidean space and to quantum mechanics.
Juan Luis Moraza (b. 1960, Vitoria-Gasteiz)
Under the title of Republica, Moraza arranges a constellation of intersections—the pending and the upcoming, the necessary and the impossible, the common and the individual, and the local and the planetary. The artistic media assemble the content in response to two questions or matters: the matter of configuration and the matter of representation. Both of these matters are concentrated in the commitments and requisites of the work brought to life in the sculptural suite on show in Itinerarios.
Guillermo Paneque (b. 1963, Sevilla)
Unsolicited Piece is a single-channel video work, made in black and white and with sound, which untiringly shows the small performative acts that are part and parcel of a type of documentary language, as well as the movements of an anodyne object which is commonly found in Manila. The result is part of an open debate which he employs to explore the idea of the “intruder” and the capacity of searching the underside and the imagined.
Rodríguez-Méndez (b. 1968; As Neves, Pontevedra)
Rodríguez-Méndez is interested in sculpture, action and words as forms to be utilized to interfere in their semantics, thus creating expanded works that develop beyond the confines of their installation and form. Accordingly, he seeks to question the process of construction and delimitation of spaces and supports with these works. By employing several different languages and disciplines in his projects, unconnected from the influence of the exhibition space, he analyses the material principles intrinsic to the sculptures and to the essential and physical experience of man. He usually produces series, as repetition seems to contain all the inconsistencies of any work.
Carlos Valverde (b. 1987, Cáceres)
The ADYTON project was carried out on an architecture located in the city of Barcelona that was rented out and operated on for nine months behind closed doors—in three stages lasting three months each. At the end of each stage, the doors of the architecture were opened to the public. Valverde’s work explores a sculptural particularity which affects architecture and its audiences, as well as the performativity and/or hermeneutics of both. The piece may in fact be an act of defiance against the lack of vision and lack of consideration with regard to spatial events and cultural goods in these volatile times of a crisis of values.
