Ignasi aballí at ADNPlatform
Ignasi Abllí takes part in the group show Screens and Pills,
curated by Montse Badia
ADNPlatform, Sant Cugat, Barcelona
From 19 January until 18 May, 2019
Antoni Miralda
In the imaginaries and ceremonials of the artist Antoni Miralda, small-scale domestic tasks and large constructions in the public space are creative processes of the same intensity. In much the same way, his physical displacements make him a nomad, while his alchemy of colours and flavours bestows on him a shamanic identity rooted in place – places; a hard-to-classify artist, an anomaly that gives him the highest privilege when it comes to eroticizing delicacies and delighting in gastronomic encounters.
He was born in Terrassa (Barcelona), a place of textile factories and densely woven social fabrics. He travelled and settled as a young man in the Paris and New York of the Seventies, where he energized the processes of his highly individual aesthetic warp and weft and his relational scenarios. He has always guided his works and collaborations like an anthropologist, a way of working far removed from solipsism. For Miralda, art is a stove on which you can cook and a table to be shared. The furniture of this unusual artist’s studio is rich in Pop reminiscences and magical chiaroscuros: cannibalism, aphrodisiac delicacies, organic fruits, martial miniatures, colourful advertising icons, cookery books, pagan weddings, videos, grandmother’s recipes and virtual museums.
His productions, unclassifiable and as such indispensable, have been shown and taken place in leading museums in cities and international events around the world. A wealth of publications disseminate the works and analyze his creative spirit. Together with Montse Guillén, he runs the FoodCulturaMuseum life project, a museum at the mercy of the elements, without time or coordinates. A project for eternity.
In 2018 Antoni Miralda was awarded the prestigious Velázquez Prize for his incomparable way of working the concept of ritual and party in a playful and participatory manner, with an emphasis on the political and critical nature of his works. In other words: the artist knows that bread is more important than money, and friendship more than success.
Pilar Bonet
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Joseph Beuys Difesa della Natura, 1982 |
Multiple | color offset on cardboard, signed by the artist |
35,5 x 44,5 cm. |
The relationship of the human being with nature is one of the central questions in the thought of Joseph Beuys. From 1971 on Beuys was a frequent visitor to Italy, where he developed the project DIFESA DELLA NATURA, his proposal for the emergence of a new culture in which art was to become an everyday act that went beyond the artistic context. The gallery space run by Lucrezia De Domizio and Giuseppe Durini in Pescara provided Beuys with the opportunity to experiment with different systems of agricultural cultivation – he saw agriculture as linked to the centrality of the human being liberated from all ideology of power – and to pursue this investigation of the truth through his own presence in nature. At Pescara he organized encounters, actions and debates as forms of collaborative practice, of betterment and defence. Between 1971 and 1985, Beuys carried out a series of works associated with the Difesa della Naturaproject, articulated in the following actions: Encounter with Beuys (1974), Grassello (1979), Piantagioni (1984), Olivestone (1984) and Unfinished Projects (1985). Encounter with Beuys (1974) is a debate in which the artist posits nature as possessing an infinite, continuous, linear time and space and a terrestrial physicality that cannot be different from or far removed from a curved, infinite, continuous and linear cosmic spirituality. In this context, he puts forward the notions of free creativity and the expanded concept of art, linked to the belief in the universal power of human creativity and the conviction that art can bring about revolutionary change. In Grassello(1979) Beuys used slaked lime (grassello) to restore his house and studio in Germany, and synthesized the reaction of the Italian material on coming into contact with German water in the formula Ca(OH)2+ H2O. The essence of the work is the journey of the material from Pescara to Düsseldorf, a process documented photographically by Durini. Piantagioni (1984) was a collaborative project combining agricultural wisdom and the ecological function of plants, organized for human purposes, which resulted in the planting of 7000 oaksin Kassel. Olivestone (1984) consists of a sculpture made from fivestone vats used by the Durini family since the sixteenth century to decant and purify olive oil. Beuys created larger stone cuboids, placed the vats inside them and filled them with 200 litres of oil from the Durini estate. As in communicating vessels, the oil seeps through the sculpture, producing a reflecting mirror effect. Olivestone combines plant and mineral elements, the solid and the liquid, feminine and masculine aspects, chaos and order, utility and aesthetics. From this starting point various elements, including multiples in limited and unlimited editions such as cases of wine and bottles of olive oil, graphic material, stamps, documents and so on are the material means of disseminating these ideas of Beuys in this great project holistic conceived with a view to liberating the Western world from its materialism and achieving a social harmony based on direct democracy and mutual solidarity, irrespective of people’s economic, religious or political status. Montse Badia |