The centrepiece to the Canary Island artist Carmela Garcia’s (Lanzarote, 1964) work is the dual need to rethink and change the world. Creating from a gender perspective is not only a simple way of projecting the need for another future it signifies a stage to claim a different consideration of femininity in the world. After taking this position, García experiences a need to reassess the construction of history, to narrate in a different way the stories of those who built the imaginary, establishing a new order of reference in articulation as well as building an everyday radically different in operational and symbolic terms .
Culture, understood as tradition, has established a number of strong references of reading the world. In Planeta Ella, Carmela García reviews those references from the formal and iconic level through a proposal that seeks to establish a set of dialogues and contra-positions between nature, history and cultural codes. In this way, Garcia's silver spaces, inhabited by silver-plated sculptures of a woman and a giraffe (symbol of grace and elegance), allude to, at first glance, the way in which our own tradition has imagined the future, a time often described with utopian adjectives. Conversely, the space presents us with a sterile atmosphere, waxy and metal, an almost experimental context. This asepsis allows for the assessment of the potential of re-entry and re-writing offered by surfaces, forms and contexts stripped of references, noise and interference of a cultural offering.
A second exhibition space of smaller dimensions hosts five photographs in a tondo shape (pictorial composition in a circle). In each of them the protagonist is a naked woman placed in a primarily natural context which refers to, in an initial interpretation, the mythical figure of Eve.
Carmela Garcia leans on formal and iconic resources to demonstrate the paradox and the difficulty of the paradigm shift. Thus, while the tondo turns to the mirror, with the classical references that entails, but also to a closed universe, the iconographies raised allude to issues and codes of representation which traditionally carry the story and whose creations we have assumed through art and vision. Thus, Carmela Garcia’s work displays her idea of a history that only makes the myth of "the wild and the natural" operational in a male code; or the "sublime" which, from Romanticism, is considered primarily an experience reserved for man.
Exhibition´s details
Museo Reina Sofía Publications
Current exhibitions
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20 November 2024 – 31 March 2025
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6 November 2024 – 17 March 2025
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9 October 2024 – 10 March 2025
Esperpento
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25 September 2024 - 10 March 2025
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4 October 2024 – 9 March 2025
GENE
Topia and Revolution: 1986–1988
Library and Documentation Centre