LORENA ESPITIA TORRES Portfolio 2006 - 2014
INDEX OF WORKS Page 5
The fabrication of facts
Page 16
Life, the universe and everything
Page 22
Sentimental Journey
Page 28
REMAKE
Page 33
A call that failed
Page 38
The triumph of the will
Page 45
Return of the living dead
Page 50
Political Decorative Art
Page 56
Nuevos Ricos’ Pirate Franchise
Page 60
The Place of Things I`ve Never Learned
Page 65
Modular Structures for the World’s Transformation
Page 74
Hunger Deluxe
Page 81
CV
Page 85
Contact
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THE FABRICATION OF FACTS (2014)
The task of the phenomenon is to appear so as to be known. Few people can see it appear directly, but many can come to know it in image. And there may be features of the phenomenon that only make themselves known in its image, things that researchers cannot see because they are in too familiar terms with the phenomenon. That feature of a phenomenon which is only cognizable in its image is cognizable by the people alone. For this reason without their image some phenomena would not carry out the task of appearing completely, they would begin to appear (to the researcher) but they would leave things halfway if they did not finish appearing (in image, to the people). Those who produce these images are not researchers but popularizers. The phenomenon needs popularization in order to fully appear.
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Bivalves. Charnière Asthenodonte- Corbula Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 70 X 60 cms 2014
Bivalves Ligament Multivinculaire Isognomon Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 70 X 60 cms 2014 6
Bivalves Dentition Paléotaxodonte - Eutaxodonte ligament duplivinculaire Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 70 X 60 cms 2014
Bivalves Charnière Asthénodonte- Corbula Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 70 X 60 cms 2014 7
Bivalves Type Cyrénoïde Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 70 X 60 cms 2014
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RĂŠpartition stratigraphique des principales superfamilies, rapports phylĂŠtiques probables Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 1.50 x 90 cms 2014 9
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The Van Allen belt, the magnetic field of the Earth Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 1.20 x 80 cms 2014
The solar wind emanating from the sun, compresses the magnetic field of the earth by the side facing the Sun. Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 52. 5 x 1.40 cms 2014 11
Généralités sur les ammonites- Cloisons de type ammonitique Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 1.20 x 70 cms 2014 12
Relations phylogéniques et stratigraphiques des ammonites du crétacé Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 150 X 70 cms 2014 13
Les Nérinées Genre Diosoptyxis – Crétacé Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on paper maché medidas variables 2014
Les Nérinées Genre Nerinea – Jurassique Supèrieur Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on paper maché Variable dimensions 2014 14
Structure des Nummulites Schéma général d’ organisation Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on paper maché Variable dimensions 2014
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LIFE , THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING ELSE (2013-2014)
During a trip to Paris on June, 2013, I found by chance the Natural History Museum, a place frozen in time for decades, where each of the exhibited objects is explained by means of billboards that work as a sort of analog infographics. So, I started working on a series derived from the first one, but specifically devoted to billboards from that Natural History Museum. What I began to find is that many of these images, once separated from their textual explanations, became abstract compositions whose forms immediately reminded me of the pictorial practices of modernism. Thus, I started working on a series of acrylic and polyurethane enamel on wood paintings, consisting in copies of some of those diagrams and schemes, where I decided to remove every auxiliary, nonvisual information, obtaining sophistated abstract pictorial objects in terms of composition, color and technical process.
Coupe schématique á travers les principales formations récifales du grand erg Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 90 x 90 cms 2013
Distribution stratigraphique des principaux groupes de brachiopodes Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 85 x 90 cms 2013 17
Morphologie et developpement des bryozoaires
Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf
1.20 x 90 cms 2013
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RĂŠpartition stratigraphique des principaux groupes de gastropodes marins Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 1.20 x 70 cms 2013 19
Arbre généalogique des échinodermes (d’après cuénot, modifié) Acrílico y esmalte de poliuretano sobre madera y repisa 90 x 85 cms 2013 20
Relations phylogeniques et stratigraphiques des ammonites du trias Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood and shelf 1.50 x 70 cms 2013 21
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY (2013)
I went to N端rnberg for a two months residency without any idea on what to do, pushed for non-artistic motivations as well as by the challenge that implied the making of a project in a totally unknown place. Blank minded as I was, one day a deer came to me in the forest and I took a picture of it. I decided to make a embroidery reminiscent of that encounter, so I spent every day, everywhere in N端rnberg doing this anonymous labour. At some point, personal situations, landscape, history and stories collided together, and the result was a long video document that gives testimony of a humble activity embroidered with feelings, conflicts, emotions and voices in my head. Art residency as a memorial / Tourism as an Art form... just a sentimental journey. You can watch the video (10 minutes version) online at: https://vimeo.com/90423743
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REMAKE (2012) R E M A K E (2012)
This installation consists of a set of elements taken from La Chinoise, the film by Jean-Luc Godard that tells the story of a group of young parisian Maoists just before May 68. I was interested in creating links between the plot / visual elements from Godard’s film and the recent dynamics of colombian political situation: the peace talks with the FARC, the struggles by students and unions, the protests against mining corporations and, in general, the tension that the country is experiencing. On the other hand, the piece works as a critique of the artists’ use of political conflicts as a way for self-promoting and social climbing. You can watch the video online at: https://vimeo.com/89881201
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A CALL THAT FAILED (2011)
This work is the result of an artist’s residency in Mexico, and includes: a poster, 17 meters long, drawn on chalk over black paper and pasted on a street wall in Coyoacán, Mexico City; a video recording that tracks the poster’s process of decay and dismantling at the mercy of natural forces and passers-by; an exhibition of the remains of the poster after two weeks of on-site installation. The work comments on the decay of the ideals outlined by the great masters of Mexican muralism, using as leitmotiv a sentence by David Alfaro Siqueros: “The painting that will survive under the sun, under the rain, facing the street”. and reflects on the role played by the notions of the perennial and the monumental in Latin-American modernism, measured against the precarious and transitory nature of this intervention called to fail.
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THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (2011)
After a complex history, full of errata, alterations and difficulties, and as the culmination of which one of my paintings was damaged, I decided to bring the painting’s life-cycle to an end by destroying it with a hammer and painting it over again from scratch. This time I was careful to make no mistakes and I struggled to find a way to make it strong enough to resist the passage of time, mishandling and carelessness. The installation includes: a video recording of the original painting being destroyed; the painting’s “remake;” and a book, which I commissioned, narrating the painting’s story and reflecting on the relationship between strength and weakness, error and perfection, creative process and destruction. You can watch it online at: https://vimeo.com/62920235
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RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (2011)
I held on to the fragments of the broken painting for a few months and finally decided to put them back together again in order to bring the painting back to life, as in an experiment by Dr. Frankenstein. I envisioned bringing this buried work back to the surface, just like in zombie movies, where everything begins in a place that is apparently calm in which, suddenly, a sinister hand emerges from the ground.
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POLITICAL DECORATIVE ART (2010)
In early 2010 I was represented by a gallery in Bogota with which I began to have, almost from the onset, all kinds of problems and misunderstandings. Already for some time I had been wondering about the phenomenon of politically “engaged” art in Colombia, and in particular about the way in which it is almost exclusively employed as a means of social validation for the artists who produce it and as a source of good conscience for art collectors who claim to “contribute to the solution of the conflict” by purchasing works of art. For this reason I decided to produce a set of paintings and sculptural objects, intensely decorative in kind, that would challenge the political character of works of art and the protocols for their commercialization. In brief, it was something like an act of revenge against “political artists” and the irresponsible manipulation of my work by the gallery, with which I severed all ties after this work was exhibited.
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Political Decorative Art Acrylic and Polyurthane Enamel on Wood 150 x 150 x 10 cms
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Imperialism and All Reactionaries are Paper Tigers (diptych) Acrylic and Polyurthane Enamel on Wood 120 x 90 x 10 cms each 2010
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They crash and scatter everything Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood 120 x 120 x 10 cms 2010
And red organizes a settlement on the black square Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood 120 x 120 x 10 cms 2010 53
I was a Maoist Intellectual Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood 100 x 100 x 10 cms 2010
Harmless Political Art Acrylic and Polyurethane Enamel on Wood 100 x 100 x 10 cms 2010 54
Art is the Icing on the Cake of the Bourgeois Acrylic and Polyurethane on Wood 120 x 120 x 10 cms 2010 55
NUEVOS RICOS’ PIRATE FRANCHISE (2009)
Klassenkampfe, a collective constituted by myself and Victor Albarracin, was invited by Mexican artist Carlos Amorales to participate with a project for his one-man show at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. The project was an installation that included silk-screened prints, audio CDs and T-shirts, produced by us as pirate versions of images by Amorales and of the music published by his label Nuevos Ricos. These were deformed, decontextualized and exhibited in an overtly precarious display that clashed against the clean and sophisticated look of the originals. In that sense, the project staged a “class struggle” between the elegance of the sources and the mishap nature of our appropriation of them. The idea was to generate a spatial short-circuit within the show, and to pull off the deed of placing a brazenly bad, dirty and shabby work in one of Europe’s most prestigious sites for art exhibition.
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THE PLACE OF THINGS I NEVER LEARNED (2009)
This was my first approach to the practice of installation, as well as a fable of sorts, in the manner of Aesop, on the topics of prejudice, power and learning, staging an inquiry into social roles through the humanization of animal behaviors and clichés. By deploying, as a visual strategy, the scenery of a schoolroom for animals, characteristic of animation work produced by the major studios (Disney and Warner) between 1940 and 1960, I commented critically on the pedagogy of homogenization and the battle against difference, always understood as defective or threatening. As George Orwell puts it at the end of Animal Farm, “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
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MODULAR STRUCTURES FOR WORLD TRANSFORMATION (2008)
This series of paintings emerged at the intersection of two sources of interest for me, which overlapped in a hybrid visual experiment: on the one hand, my fascination with the communicative strategies and procedures for social incorporation of the Russian avant-gardes in the 1920’s and 30’s; and on the other hand, my recurring examination of U.S. advertising imagery from the Cold War era. At a certain point I began to think about the concern, present in both fields, to present a world constructed out of utopian promises, although diametrically opposed to each other.
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Spooky & Casper cookies/ Rodchenko propaganda III Acrylic and enamel on wood 50 x 50 x 10 cms
Return to the Prehistoric: Modular Structure in Transformation II Acrylic and enamel on wood 50 x 50 x 10 cms 2008
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09.11.01: Modular Structure in Transformation II (dyptich) Acrylic and enamel on wood 20 x 20 x 10 cms each 2008 68
Proun 93 / Star Fortress Scene I Acrylic and enamel on wood 90 x 90 x 10 cms 2008
Proun 93 / Star Fortress Scene II Acrylic and enamel on wood 90 x 90 x 10 cms 2008 69
Untitled (El Lissitzky: Proun 1c) Letterpress ink and Acrylic on wood 100 x 100 x 10 cms. 2008
Proun 99: Modular Metaphysics I Acrylic and enamel on wood 100 x 100 x 10 cms 2008
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Popeye’s Buitoni Macaroni / Rochenko’s Propaganda I Acrylic and enamel on wood 50 x 50 x 10 cms. 2008
Donald Duck Fudgi-Frost / Rochenko’s Propaganda II Acrylic and enamel on wood 50 x 50 x 10 cms. 2008
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Need (Communist Sandwich Made From a Song by Las Malas Amistades and From a Poster by Rodchenko). letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 80 x 80 cms 2007 72
Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto – Rodchenko’s Candy Box (Version with Errata) 200 x 70 x 10 cms 2008
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HUNGER DELUXE (2006-2008)
During the final stage of my life as an undergraduate student I began to experiment with inks and other materials used in engraving and the print industry. My intention was to pervert the standard use of these materials by taking advantage of them in the production of paintings. At the same time, I began to investigate the role of canonical genres in painting (landscapes, portraits and still-lifes), and my questions about the latter overlapped with my interest in the characters employed in food advertising and my passion for comic books and graphic novels. The result of these intersecting concerns was a long series of paintings, done with typographic ink on wood, depicting absurd situations that questioned the specific characteristics of pictorial genres and generated narratives that subverted our typical ways of understanding advertising materials and of relating to ideas and practices of consumer culture.
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Untitled (Sunset on the Beach while Carrott and Broccoli Boast on the Killing and Beheading of Mr. Pringles) Letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 110 x 110 cms 2007 76
Untitled (Durer’s Hare is not Beuys’ Hare Letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 90 x 90 cms. 2007
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Untitled (The Trix Rabbitt Misses a Number of Strange Events for Looking what He Doesn’t Mind Letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 90 x 90 x 10 cms 2006
Untitled (Inflatable Goose and Rubber Duckies on a Rennaissance Landscape) Letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 20 x 20 x 10 cms 2007 78
Untitled (Vintage Elephant Rubber Toy on a Rodchenko’s Commercial Design) Letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 70 x 70 2007
Untitled (Humpty Dumpty, Mrs. Potato Head and Yoko Walk for Paris) Letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 60 x 60 cms 2007 79
Untitled (Evil Cauliflower Chasing the Rice Krispy Kids) Letterpress ink and acrylic on wood 110 x 110 cms 2006 80
EDUCATION 2007 Bachelor of Visual Arts.. Universidad Distrital – Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá. INDIVIDUAL SHOWS 2013 Viaje sentimental. [Sentimental Journey]. Kunst -& Kurhaus Katana e.V, Nürnberg, Germany. La vida, el universo y todo lo demás. [Life, the universe and everything] Galería Valenzuela & Klenner. Bogotá 2012 R E M A K E . Alianza Francesa, Bogotá 2012 Un llamamiento fallido. [A call that failed].Galería La Trampa, México D.F / M I A M I Gallery, Bogotá 2011 El lugar de las cosas que nunca aprendí II. [The Place of Things I`ve Never Learned II] Lugar a dudas, Cali 2010 Arte político decorativo. [Political Decorative Art] Galería Christopher Paschall, Bogotá 2009 El lugar de las cosas que nunca aprendí [The Place of Things I`ve Never Learned]. Centro Colombo - Americano, Bogotá 2008 Estructuras modulares para la transformación del mundo. [Modular Structures for the World’s Transformation]. Lado B Arte Consultores, Bogotá 2007 Hambre Deluxe. [Hunger Deluxe]. Galería Santa Fe (Sala Alterna), Bogotá 2006 Menufactura. El Bodegón (contemporary art and social life), Bogotá 2005 Estamos Fritos. [We’re Done.] Sala alterna Galería Mar, Bogotá GROUP SHOWS (SELECTION) 2014 Terrícola. [Earthling], Museo de Arte de Pereira, Pereira, Colombia. La materia degenerada. [The degenerate matter], Espacio El Parche, Bogotá, Colombia.
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Textos visibles, audibles y legibles. [Visible, audible and readable texts] . 2004-2014 Galería Santa Fe , Galería Santa Fe, Bogotá, Colombia. Qué bonito! [How pretty!], Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá, Bogota, Colombia. 2013 Saber Desconocer. 43 Salón (inter) Nacional de artistas. Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia. El azote del culo [the scourge of ass]. Espacio La Quincena, Bogotá, Colombia. “Nueva”: Nueva pintura colombiana [‘New’: New Colombian painting]. Museo la Tertulia. Cali, Colombia. Revolución & simulacro [Revolution & simulacra]. Museo la Tertulia. Cali, Colombia. 2012 Manimal. The Warehouse Art. Bogotá. Navidad de navidades. [Christmas’ Christmas] L.A galeria. Bogotá 2011 Intentos para un mundo perfecto. [Attempts For a Perfect World].Salón de Arte BBVA – Nuevos Nombres Banco de la República. Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá Analogies. Now Contemporary Art, Miami 2009 Franquicia pirata [Pirate Franchise] (Klassenkämpfe: Víctor Albarracín & Lorena Espitia). Collaborative project at Carlos Amorales’ Nuevos Ricos exhibition. Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel Salón de Arte Bidimensional. Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá ArtBo – Artecámara Pavillion. Corferias, Bogotá
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Casa de citas. [Date House]. Museo de Antioquia, Medellín Piratería sentimental. [Sentimental Piracy].La Residencia, Bogotá 2008 Ciertas cosas, cosas ciertas. Lado B - Arte Consultores, Bogotá Salón de Arte Joven Colsanitas. International Art Fair of Bogotá. Corferias Inoxidable Neopop. [Rustproof Neopop].GalerÌa Santa Fe, Bogotá Por pintar. [For the sake of Painting]. Galería Cu4rto Nivel, Bogotá 2006 II Salón de Arte Joven El Nogal. Club el Nogal, Bogotá Salón de Arte Digital. Fundación Gilberto Alzáte Avendaño, Bogotá El marco es lo que vale. [The Frame is What Counts].El Bodegón (contemporary art and social life), Bogotá 2005 VIII Salón de Estudiantes ASAB. Galería ASAB, Bogotá Desearía que estuvieras aquí. [I Wish You Were Here]. Espacio la Rebeca, Bogotá 2004 Sin formato. [Format-less]. Ministerio de Cultura, itinerant show ART FAIRS 2013 2012
ArtBo, Bogotá Colombia ArtBo, Bogotá, Colombia 83
2011 2010 2010 2010 2009
Arteaméricas, Latin American Art Fair. Miami (FL), USA Pinta. London, UK Scope. Basel, Switzerland Circa. San Juan, Puerto Rico Art Basel. Miami (FL), USA.
PRIZES AND RESIDENCIES 2013 2012 2012 2011 2009 2008 2007 2006
Residency at Kunst -& Kurhaus Katana e.V, Nürnberg, Germany Prize, Nuevas Propuestas 2012 - Alianza Francesa, Bogotá, Colombia Residency at FONCA, México D.F. Mention, Salón de Arte Bidimensional, Bogotá, Colombia Mention, Salón de Arte Bidimensional, Bogotá, Colombia 1st. Prize, Salón de Arte joven Colsanitas, Bogotá, Colombia Residencyas part of El Bodegón collective at MDE 07, Medellín, Colombia 1st. Prize, II Salón de pintura joven Club el Nogal, Bogotá, Colombia
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CONTACT: Lorena Espitia Torres (++57)3016964176 lorenaespitiatorres@gmail.com skype: lorenaespitiatorres 85
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