New exhibitions
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC)
C/ Ramón del Valle Inclán s/n
15704 Santiago de Compostela
Spain
Ph.: +34 981 546 629
Fax.: +34 981 546 625
cgac@xunta.es
www.cgac.org
CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Spain.) is pleased to present our forthcoming exhibitions of Portuguese sculptor José Pedro Croft and Danish artist Eva Koch. Both exhibitions can be visited until the end of June 2003
José Pedro Croft (Porto, Portugal, 1957), who works mainly in the fields of sculpture and drawing, creates ambiguous situations, which are on the border between stability and instability, where the notions of interior and exterior, weight and frailty, functionality, discontinuity or immateriality are questioned. In the last few years, Croft has also sought to provoke an effect of dynamisation of spatial relations within each piece and amongst pieces with regard to the space sheltered and the movements of the spectator.
Through a selection of approximately thirty recent pieces of work, this exhibition has been conceived as a great installation where all the works, despite their different materials and volumes, are interrelated. It does not follow a chronological or linear sequence but works like an archaeological deposit where different strata have been mixed. Reality is captured with interferences, producing crossover looks, experiencing dislocations, formulating different growths and energies until achieving the definition of the sculpture as a delimitation of space.
The remarkable presence of drawings in the exhibition proves their great importance for Croft. In them there is an alternation of rhythms, zones are activated, tensions between lines and stresses are assayed, measured and intuited traces are used, planes and voids that render dynamic spaces and disfigure perception.
We will also present new sculptures in iron, glass and mirror, which are blunt and of great size apart from having been specifically conceived for Alvaro Sizas architecture. They interact with space. The mirrors do not only reflect our image but also lead certain outer fragments to penetrate the sculpture, extending it, rendering it dynamic, fragmenting and decomposing vision planes, as if they were unrelated pieces of image and reality.
Villar, an installation by Eva Koch, tells a story which began in 1934, when Gregorio Martínez died in the Teruel village of Villar del Cobo, leaving his widow, Manuela, with the responsibility of bringing up five children. Soon after her husbands death, she fell ill and two of her children, Cristobalina and Ángel, were sent to the orphanage in Teruel. When the Spanish Civil War started, the orphanage was evacuated and Cristobalina, Eva Kochs mother, was sent to a hospice in Valencia where a Norwegian volunteer grew fond of her and managed to contact her aunt, who, ignoring what could have happened to the rest of the family, signed the adoption papers. Thus a new life started for Cristobalina, whose name was changed into Chris. She was educated in Norway and moved to the Faeroe Islands where she met by chance a couple from Teruel, who offered to investigate about her family. The reencounter took place in 1962.
Thirty-eight years later, Eva Koch manages to reunite her family members again. Before Evas camera, the main characters in this story tell their memories, while hurtful feelings arise, like separation, continuous presence despite the absence The outcome proves that in a familys bosom there are always different sides for the same story, which questions the existence of a definitive and true version. In order to preserve this polyvalent vision, the work presents six projections that allow the spectator to learn the most intimate confessions of the main characters, alongside the lifestyle and landscapes of the village. In Villar Koch favors interactivity as a means of «rewarding» the visitors curiosity, who makes up his or her own version of a story, which is shared by many broken families in the wake of a civil war.
For further information
CGAC Press Department
Tel.: +34 981 546 632 / cgac.prensa@xunta.es
Images: left – Eva Koch, right – José Pedro Croft