Abraham Lacalle. Experiments with Landscape

Dates: June 1 - October 3, 2021
Curator: Iván de la Torre
Coordinator: Alberto Figueroa
Space: South Cloister

Abraham Lacalle (Almería, 1962), who studied in Seville and settled in Madrid after two consecutive residencies (1994-95 and 1995-96) at the Casa de Velázquez thanks to grants received from the former Museum of Contemporary Art of Seville, is one of the most internationally recognized Spanish artists of his generation. His conviction that intellectual attitude and mental effort are the cornerstone of every creative act and of the painter's profession has found a field ripe for experimentation in the landscape.

This exhibition surveys the artist's oeuvre from 2010 to the present, when the changes that began when he made landscape the core and pivotal axis of his work are now clearly perceptible. Everything revolves around one central idea: to turn this pictorial genre, eminently imitative by design and by choice, into a narrative tool, in which the artist takes charge of the story and adapts it to suit the purposes of a language that is conceptual, assertive and acutely conscious of the relationship between humanity and nature.

Upon reviewing-in chronological order and intentional synchronicity-the rich and wide variety of visual and intellectual resources used by the Andalusian painter, from allegorical reinvention and research into the symbolic significance of imagery to narrative intertextuality or "attracting" morpho-chromatic impacts, we eventually discover the ulterior motives behind his creative proposal. His project is committed to environmental ethics (now and for the future) and offers a self-referential reflection on the modes of the pictorial process and their subversion, analysing the landscape's potential to expand and intermingle with other genres.

 

 

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION

[Catalogue]

[Leaflet]

[Press Dossier (In Spanish)]

[High Resolution Images]

[Photo Album on Flickr]