print Summer 2003

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina

Although he has been producing since the early ’60s, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina was, until recently, unknown, even in Spain, outside a small group of followers. He works in a variety of registers, and his oeuvre runs the gamut from sociologically oriented proposals for public spaces, which he calls “Arquitectura premature” (Premature architecture), 1984–92, to works with a more poetic tone; and he is one of the few figures from the heyday of Conceptual art still working and putting forth coherent ideas. Valcárcel Medina has held tight to his convictions, and this has kept the institutions of

print May 2002

Alberto García Alix

Alberto García Alix is a veteran photographer whom the art world had thought little about up until a few years ago. Now that our sense of the medium has expanded, his work, strongly tied to a specific time and place—Madrid in the ’80s—has succeeded in moving beyond this context and can be seen simply as one of the best oeuvres in contemporary Spanish photography. His work is consistently documentary in approach, although on occasion what’s documented is quite personal. García Alix’s work employs a straightforward vocabulary in capturing images from reality, even if he sometimes

print April 2002

Los Torreznos

Los Torreznos is a name sometimes used by a duo who have been working together, though not exclusively so, for ten years—Jaime Vallaure and Rafael Lamata also work individually. Despite their youth, both are veterans of performance and video, and they have developed a very distinct collaborative personality based on a sense of the spectacle—which is not to say frivolity but rather an awareness that theirs are works developed over time—along with a desire to investigate or reflect on contemporary issues both social and artistic.

Such interests persisted in La noche electoral (Election

print November 2001

Charles Congost

Although in Spain his name is associated with video, Carles Congost's work is not tied to a single medium but rather takes advantage of diverse resources. Over the last year he has shown this flexibility in two exhibitions that—though they shared works in common—represented distinct yet complementary projects. The first, in Barcelona, consisted of a single installation (Country Girls, 2000) using heterogeneous elements; a collage as much of media (objects, photography, video, drawings, songs) as of intentions.

Conveyed by means of a nonlinear narrative about three girls living in a

print September 2001

Jesús Palomino

EVER SINCE Jesús Palomino began exhibiting some ten years ago, he has displayed an interest in linking his work to architectonic space. At the same time he has been drawn to using varied, heterodox, often discarded materials—ones that are shabby yet aestheticized. And because he has always shown a feeling for color rare among contemporary Spanish artists, the result has been a skillful synthesis of arte povera and Matissean refinement. Since 1998 Palomino has focused on the construction of houses—shanties really: constructions that fall somewhere between assemblage and architecture.

print January 2001

Elena Del Rivero and Tere Recarens

After meeting in New York, the Spanish artists Elena del Rivero and Tere Recarens decided to work collaboratively, bringing together their distinct methods and personalities to the various works. “In Love (Entredos)” (In Love [in between]), the result of this alliance, illuminates the different ways two artists from the same country but of different generations might conceive of creating an artwork. Each is interested in making her work a projection of herself; the manner in which they approach this idea is what marks the difference.

Del Rivero became known in the early ’80s for landscape paintings

print January 2001

Zush

In the ’70s and ’80s, Zush showed widely not only in Spain but also internationally (for instance, in Documenta 6, 1977). More recently, he’s distanced himself from public activity in museums and art spaces, primarily because of his ever-growing dedication to production and diffusion via computers and the Internet, endeavors in which he has been a pioneer. Although he has occasionally exhibited in museums and galleries since then, his name is now better known to young artists than his work. Still, like a number of other Spanish artists who emerged thirty years ago, Zush is a spiritual precursor

print May 2000

José MarÍa Sicilia

From his first exhibitions, in the midst of the neo-Expressionist wave at the beginning of the ’80s, José María Sicilia’s work has been characterized by a pronounced touch of sensuality. Nature, too, has played an important role in his work; in his first solo exhibition in Spain, at the legendary Galería Fernando Vijande in 1983–84, he included a great many landscapes, some of them alpine scenes. If one attempts an overview of his work, it is clear that sensuality and beauty, and their relationship to nature, are among the issues that have interested him most deeply.

In 1993, Sicilia produced “

print April 2000

Luis Gordillo

“Superyo congelado” (Frozen superego) spans forty years of Luis Gordillo’s career. Born in 1934, Gordillo has been a central figure in Spanish art from the ’60s on, though he is far less well known abroad—a surprising fact considering his work’s affinity with that of such widely acknowledged figures as Terry Winters and Jonathan Lasker. At each stage of Gordillo’s development, his approach to the art of the moment (informalism, Pop, geometric, etc.) reveals a synthesis between his subjective impulses and the traces of external influences. In reality, each work, or even each moment in the process

print November 1999

Miguel Angel Campano

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, a group of young figurative painters living in Madrid— Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Manolo Quejido, Carlos Alcolea, and Rafael Pérez Mínguez, among others—emerged as a generation of artists who freely mixed intellectual gamesmanship and art-historical references with veiled autobiographical allusions and an often strong psychoanalytic component. Although they enjoyed much critical support, they are, thirty years later, something of a “lost generation.” Perhaps because their work was so conceptual and laden with personal references, it had little influence on the

print March 1999

Alicia Martín

With one of her first works—a book covered with pins (which has become something of a Rosetta stone for anyone trying to come to terms with young Spanish art)—Alicia Martin set out on the path she has followed as an artist ever since. Her works re-create an inner world at odds with its surroundings. She seems to have learned from Meret Oppenheim and Lucas Samaras, among others, how to use expressive materials metaphorically, to capture something of her difficult relation to reality. Adopting the spirit and iconography of the Surrealist object, Martin has constructed some powerful pieces, which

print January 1999

Francisco Ruiz de Infante

Francisco Ruiz de Infante is probably the best-known young Spanish artist working with video today, and he uses that medium in two ways: to create stories intimately related to film narration and as a complement to his installations, in which he mixes sculpture, sound, and moving images. Although in the past he inflected the strictly audiovisual with a strong literary bent, he moved away from that practice as his work progressed. However, in his most recent show, for which he prepared two installations, the artist once again brought these heterogeneous elements together for the first time in

Pablo Llorca