Marina Vargas
12 Dec 2013 - 11 Feb 2014
MARINA VARGAS
La Muerte Por Las Manos
12 December - 11 February 2014
Galería Javier López presents, for the first time at their exhibition space, the works of Marina Vargas (Granada, 1980) with a specific project born from her collaboration with the new art director of the gallery, Fer Francés. The artist and curator have chosen a verse from the poem ‘Me sobra el corazón’ by Miguel Hernandez, that gives the title to her show:
“No puedo con mi estrella,
y busco la muerte por las manos
mirando con cariño las navajas,
y recuerdo aquel hacha compañera,
y pienso en los más altos campanarios
para un salto mortal serenamente”
The exhibition counts with recent works, which have been already revised, and previous themes delving into its semantic load revisited. The show presents a dialogue through hands (those of the creator itself and those of her works) with echoes between the different installations that resonate within us like a litany.
Since the beginning of her career, Marina Vargas has been interested in the power of forms and signs trying to unravel the overlapped meanings in the images. She reinterprets symbols of places, cultures and different times, questioning its origin and showing a personal vision marked by postmodern features such as appropriation, syncretism and ironic detachment in the recoding of the message. From the point of view of the surface, her works show an obsessive tendency for drawing, by the accumulation of figures and lines in horror vacui that translate an inversion of archetypes associated with human instincts, idolatries around life, death, sexuality, violence, love, fear, desire, pain, pleasure... while reflecting on the role of femininity in our days through the Judeo-Christian tradition, classical mythology or Hindu imagery.
Her extensive production includes the most varied media and techniques: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, in which the influences of artistic residences that have enriched her can be traced. This time she has incorporated the tapestry like a medium, recovering recycled handmade plastic mats that have originally been used for praying in Morocco. Vargas gives these objects a new life, decontextualizing and intervening them with her saturated figurative paintings unconnecting them to the Muslim tradition.
The 'Piedad invertida’ is offered to us as a game of mirrors, it faces two versions of the same theme, two complementary visions - an outer, white skinned, and an inner one, with red insides - connected by the heart, absent from the suffering breast and protected by the hand of the dead mother. In another installation, the hands express through sign language the phrase ‘Y la palabra se hizo carne,' materializing again an idea through a body part that has the ability to communicate without verbal language.
In her brief and prolific career, Marina Vargas has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in various cities of our country and at an international level, highlighting her presence in New York, Havana, Caracas, Monterrey, Milan and Casablanca - where she exhibited her first tapestry at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in the framework of the first Moroccan biennial, held in 2012. - Her work is in the permanent collections of CAAM in Las Palmas, where earlier this year she presented the project ‘Nadie es inmune,’ at CAAC in Seville, at Artium in Vitoria and at CAC Málaga, where she has an upcoming solo exhibition for the following months. Among the awards that she has received for her creative work, there are scholarships for young artists such as Antonio Gala Foundation or Iniciarte and visual arts awards, such as Injuve (Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid, 2008 and Cultural Center of Spain in Lima, 2009) and those at the foundations of Gregorio Prieto and Focus Abengoa.
La Muerte Por Las Manos
12 December - 11 February 2014
Galería Javier López presents, for the first time at their exhibition space, the works of Marina Vargas (Granada, 1980) with a specific project born from her collaboration with the new art director of the gallery, Fer Francés. The artist and curator have chosen a verse from the poem ‘Me sobra el corazón’ by Miguel Hernandez, that gives the title to her show:
“No puedo con mi estrella,
y busco la muerte por las manos
mirando con cariño las navajas,
y recuerdo aquel hacha compañera,
y pienso en los más altos campanarios
para un salto mortal serenamente”
The exhibition counts with recent works, which have been already revised, and previous themes delving into its semantic load revisited. The show presents a dialogue through hands (those of the creator itself and those of her works) with echoes between the different installations that resonate within us like a litany.
Since the beginning of her career, Marina Vargas has been interested in the power of forms and signs trying to unravel the overlapped meanings in the images. She reinterprets symbols of places, cultures and different times, questioning its origin and showing a personal vision marked by postmodern features such as appropriation, syncretism and ironic detachment in the recoding of the message. From the point of view of the surface, her works show an obsessive tendency for drawing, by the accumulation of figures and lines in horror vacui that translate an inversion of archetypes associated with human instincts, idolatries around life, death, sexuality, violence, love, fear, desire, pain, pleasure... while reflecting on the role of femininity in our days through the Judeo-Christian tradition, classical mythology or Hindu imagery.
Her extensive production includes the most varied media and techniques: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, in which the influences of artistic residences that have enriched her can be traced. This time she has incorporated the tapestry like a medium, recovering recycled handmade plastic mats that have originally been used for praying in Morocco. Vargas gives these objects a new life, decontextualizing and intervening them with her saturated figurative paintings unconnecting them to the Muslim tradition.
The 'Piedad invertida’ is offered to us as a game of mirrors, it faces two versions of the same theme, two complementary visions - an outer, white skinned, and an inner one, with red insides - connected by the heart, absent from the suffering breast and protected by the hand of the dead mother. In another installation, the hands express through sign language the phrase ‘Y la palabra se hizo carne,' materializing again an idea through a body part that has the ability to communicate without verbal language.
In her brief and prolific career, Marina Vargas has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in various cities of our country and at an international level, highlighting her presence in New York, Havana, Caracas, Monterrey, Milan and Casablanca - where she exhibited her first tapestry at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in the framework of the first Moroccan biennial, held in 2012. - Her work is in the permanent collections of CAAM in Las Palmas, where earlier this year she presented the project ‘Nadie es inmune,’ at CAAC in Seville, at Artium in Vitoria and at CAC Málaga, where she has an upcoming solo exhibition for the following months. Among the awards that she has received for her creative work, there are scholarships for young artists such as Antonio Gala Foundation or Iniciarte and visual arts awards, such as Injuve (Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid, 2008 and Cultural Center of Spain in Lima, 2009) and those at the foundations of Gregorio Prieto and Focus Abengoa.