Sala Rekalde presents Las siete ventanas, an exhibition of the best work of Idoia Montón (b. Donostia, 1969) since 1990. The show includes paintings, drawings and collages from the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, the Museo Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz and private collections. The exhibition will be showcased at MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo from April 12th till July 17th, 2022.
The title the «seven windows» is both a literal and metaphorical expression of the different ways in which the relationships between inside and outside, frame and span, street and room are conjugated in her work. It also underlines the importance of the point of view and of a gaze that is never normative, direct or centred, but lateral, multiple and fragmentary, and the enduring persistence of mirrors and the reflected image.
Taller, 1999. Acrylic and collage on cardboard, 133 x 80 cm
The radical heterogeneity of Idoia Montón’s oeuvre, created in the Basque Country and Catalonia over the last three decades, gives it a marked consistency. She views painting as an open, sovereign process, attentive to discovery and chance, in which the only constant is an organizing notion of form or structure.
Throughout her working process, she introduces, arranges and manipulates different elements, interrelating them to form what she calls an “enigmatic plane” that is to say, a situation that demands to be resolved and which advances through revelations. In this way, the breaks and discontinuities in her work reflect the absolute singularity of each process and its circumstances. However, this special autonomy is run through with a consistency whose roots lie in her own biography. Following an unstrict chronological order, tinged at all times with anachronistic associations, the exhibition is structured into four areas: Una habitación propia, Guerra, Barna and Con los ojos abiertos
Una habitación propia contains work that Montón made in the Basque Country before moving to Barcelona and includes her first sculptural experiments and a number of her paper cut-outs. These are characterised by their unusual notion of space and the stresses that (paradoxically) emerge from the strict flatness. The pieces in these rooms also display a certain narrative or allegorical content which was to remain in her later work, albeit in a more diluted and nuanced form. The section also includes a group of paintings dealing with the artist’s everyday experience, which bring a new meaning to the term ‘realism’: views of the places she has lived in; still lifes made up of the objects that surround her, and portraits of people close to her. This realism is strained through the filter of memory and imagination, giving rise to the disturbing presences that break into the scenes. From the outset, too, we see the classical tropes of the self-portrait in the studio and the paintingwithin-the-painting.
Reflejo en la K.M., 2009. Acrylic and oil on board, 48 x 68 cm
The exhibition continues with Guerra a series of works in which Montón’s concern for the depiction of power and violence is expressed through a review of the history of painting and a new approach to collage. It is a diverse series incorporating all kinds of different materials on the pictorial support, including photographs, clothes, ceramics and palettes, but it also includes unique compositions such as Púber (2015), made up exclusively of objets trouvés. The “war” of the title refers both to the long war in Syria and to the violence that capital has exerted throughout history both on individual bodies and on the world.
El rapto de las Sabinas I, 2015
Oil, acrylic and collage on DM, 49 x 38 x 8 cm
In Barna we find constant references to a specific artistic and social context in which two issues stand out above all; on the one hand, we have the artist’s response to a rejection or suspicion of the topicality of painting and on the other, her reflections on the long crisis facing the city in which she lives. Another group of works are notable both for their syntheticism and their silence. They offer a fragmented vision of things, which veils the image to the point of making it almost unrecognizable.
, 2011. Acrylic and collage on cardboard, 75 x 105 cm
The exhibition concludes with Con los ojos abiertos which combines two different bodies of work. On the one hand, we have a series of biomorphic, almost monstrous, cities where planes and directions are confused and the boundaries between the living and the dead, the animal and the mechanical, the real and its hallucination, are blurred. Not only do these tentacular machines offer a terrifying vision of the public space; they also combine three paradigmatic central motifs in the artist’s work: the city, the animal and the night.
This fourth area also includes a series begun in 2019 during Montón’s residency in Iraqi Kurdistan, promoted by Moving Artists. The Sacrifice or the Offering connects key works from the region, such as the first Kurdish temples and The Wounded Lioness, with everyday ornamental items, such as decorated plastics and textiles, embodying an idea that is as paradoxical as it is radical: a society is not held together by its productive and functional activities; rather, what makes it tremble with excitement are those activities, such as parties or games, that are an absolute waste of money.
IDOIA MONTÓN GOROSTEGUI
Idoia Montón was born in Donostia-San Sebastián in 1969 and has lived in Barcelona since 2007. She began her education at the Artistic Association of Gipuzkoa and subsequently, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the Arteleku workshops with Bonifacio Alonso and Ángel Bados, and the art school of the University of the Basque Country. She soon began exhibiting at some major galleries of the time, including Juana de Aizpuru (1991) and Buades (1992).
After a certain disillusionment with that scene, in the mid-nineties she began a long personal journey which led to intense and committed pictorial research. She later re-emerged, under mentors Javier Peñafiel and Rosa Queralt, in Halfhouse, with a solo exhibition entitled Un reflejo tangible (Barcelona, 2012). During those years of self-imposed distance and following her return, she produced a large volume of work, published in the compilation Idoia Montón (Donostia, 2014). She later displayed another section of her work in the book La guerra (La Canibal, Barcelona, 2019).
Her recent exhibitions include: Tallers conpartits, Fundación Miró (2021); El Fuego Ana Mas Proyects Gallery, (Barcelona, 2020); Zeru bat, hamaika bide. Prácticas artísticas en el País Vasco entre 1977 y 2002, Artium, (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2019); Comisariada por David Bestué, Halfhouse, (Barcelona, 2019) and Después del 68, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, (2018-19).
Amongst her many previous exhibitions are, Markak, Okela, (Bilbao) and Aquellos, Galería Sis, (Sabadell) both in 2017; La guerra, La Escocesa, (Barcelona, 2017); Arenzana Imaz Intxausti Montón Peral, Tabakalera, (Donostia, 2016); Lila, Carreras Múgica, (Bilbao, 2015) and La kasa del carpintero insurgente, Galería Alegría, (Madrid, 2014).
20 julio – 19 septiembre 2021
Sala Rekalde presenta la exposición de JENNI ALVARADO con la que inicia el ciclo de exposiciones de barriek 2021, el programa que muestra una selección de los-las artistas que han disfrutado de las becas de artes plásticas y visuales de la Diputación Foral de Bizkaia. La exposición reúne los trabajos creados por la artista en el último año: pinturas y dibujos de gran formato realizados sobre papel junto a dibujos, esculturas y proyecciones audiovisuales que representan la evolución del proceso en torno al objeto y a sus cualidades totémicas. El título de la exposición Objeto ritual se refiere al proyecto desarrollado por Jenni Alvarado durante varios años y que trata sobre la transformación de lo escultórico a lo audiovisual y de lo visual a lo pictórico, a partir de la selección de algunos fotogramas de los videos realizados.
Alvarado produce las composiciones a través de la recogida de imágenes y materiales audiovisuales en torno a la idea de ritual. Igualmente la idea de falso tótem contribuye a generar una reflexión sobre las cualidades que otorgamos a los objetos a partir de su uso y el vínculo especial que nos une a determinados elementos.