Silvia Palá Intérpretes coordinated the presentation services for the press conference on the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, the protagonist of the new exhibition at the Palau Martorell.

Alphonse Mucha was one of the leading exponents of Art Nouveau, and this exhibition is the result of the most recent research examining the theoretical aspect of Mucha’s work, especially the idea of beauty, the central principle of his artistic practice.

The exhibition consists of more than 80 pieces, including his famous posters dedicated to the divine Sarah Bernhardt, commercial objects with his unmistakable designs, as well as photographs and preparatory drawings of his works.

The exhibition is curated by the expert Tomoko Sato, and is organised by the Palau Martorell in collaboration with the Mucha Foundation.

Silvia Palá Intérpretes coordinated the interpretation services for Talking Galleries-Focus Digital, a discussion programme on the intersection between art and technology.

The two-day event was a special edition of Talking Galleries, and took place in the Meier Auditorium at Macba in Barcelona. As a platform specialising in analysis and reflection in the art sector and with the aim of promoting and participating in the most current debates, Talking Galleries introduced a programme of round tables and conferences on the intersection between art and technology, in order to debate how technology is transforming artistic creation at different levels.

The result has been a highlighting of the rich ecosystem of digital innovation in Barcelona, favouring a space of connection with the visual arts sector, a conference that has managed to bring together key professionals from the digital creativity sector in the city, and also from abroad.

Silvia Palá Intérpretes had the pleasure of providing simultaneous interpreting services for the 9th edition of Talking Galleries, Edition 2022, held on 3 and 4 October in Barcelona.

Talking Galleries is the big think tank on contemporary art galleries.

With a two-day programme of debates, talks and networking, the Barcelona Symposium has brought together national and international art professionals in a framework that promotes exchange and analysis of art galleries.

The 2022 edition marked the return of Talking Galleries’ flagship event to its city of origin, after a two-year break due to the pandemic, and sought to address the new challenges and concerns that have emerged on the art agenda since the previous meeting in early 2020.

Topics of discussion included the impact of NFTs on the market, inclusive narratives in the art world, the rise of Paris as an art centre, the relationship between art fairs and biennials, gallery practices in the secondary market, and innovative projects between art and technology, among other relevant current issues in the sector.

The Silvia Palá Intérpretes team took part in the press conference and opening of the first exhibition that offers a global perspective on the work of Cinthia Marcelle, “A conjunction of factors”, behind which lies the desire to disorganise the hierarchies and binary oppositions that articulate our daily lives. You can see it at MACBA until 8 January 2023.

Information source: Fundación Tàpies

The Fundación Tàpies is hosting, from 15 March to 25 September, the work of the Polish artist Goshka Macuga, born in Warsaw in 1967. In this exhibition, entitled In Movement and co-produced by MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León) and curated by NeusMiró, the artist revisits the relationship between art, power and narratives around events and figures from history.

Her pieces take the form of large installations, specifically three that have been particularly significant in the artist’s career: Plus Ultra, from 2009, The Nature of the Beast (2010) and Untitled (2011). At the centre of each of these three installations is a tapestry, around which other works and documents are also articulated. In each of these three installations she mixes pieces of her own creation with material found in archives and exhibitions, thus proposing new approaches to inherited accounts of historical events and figures.

The artist, who left Warsaw in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, explains that she comes from a country where one had to support the Russians, but that her family raised her in hatred of that country. According to Macuga, wealth in Russia is distributed among Putin’s supporters like a drug cartel, and in her opinion she has started collecting art to launder money. Macuga also expresses her concern for the more than one and a half million Ukrainians who have arrived in Poland.

The artist, fragile in appearance but forceful in her gestures and speech, kindly attended to all the media who came to admire her work.

Photos by: Silvia Palá Intérpretes

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Melanie Smith was born in the United Kingdom in 1965, but has developed her career in the Mexican art scene since the 90´s. In 1989 she left behind the political and economic tensions of Thatcher’s Britain to settle in Mexico, where she witnessed the impact of capitalist modernization, neoliberal globalization and hyper-consumerism, the development of an informal economy parallel to traditional forms of manufacturing, and the continuing failures or collapse of modernity.

Both contexts – the Mexican or, more broadly, Latin American, and the British or, more broadly, Anglo-Saxon or Eurocentric culture – are essential to her work. Although Smith does not define herself as a painter and works in a variety of media, they are all imbued with a singular and persistent reference to painting.

In his work Smith displays a continuous play between farce (in the sense of absurdity, mockery or parody) and artifice (understood as artificiality and deception and ultimately as the “artifice of reason”) and applies these concepts to contemporary society and what has been called “baroque modernity”. This exhibition covers Smith’s work from the early nineties to the present day. Rather than following a chronological arrangement, it is organised according to a series of apparently simple themes or motifs that are recurrent in his production: Abstraction, Urban, Colour, Body, Archaeology, Nature and Scale. This arrangement allows for the juxtaposition of works produced at different moments in the artist’s career, highlighting the continuities between them and at the same time embracing tensions, conflicts, irrationality and chaos. The artist herself has defined her corpus as a “giant palimpsest”.

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Talking Galleries es el Think Tank internacional para Galerías de Arte durante el cual profesionales del mundo del arte se encuentran durante dos días para debatir con más de 200 profesionales procedentes de 25 países del ámbito internacional en una plataforma de reflexión y análisis dirigida a galeristas de arte contemporáneo. Esta sexta edición, celebrada los días 22 y 23 de enero en el Auditorio del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, en la que he tenido el placer de participar como intérprete de conferencia, ha contado con la destacada presencia del galerista francés Daniel Templon, encargado de impartir la conferencia inaugural del simposio así como otros reconocidos galeristas como Ursula Krinzinger, David Juda, Alex Logsdail y Adam Sheffer. Además de la conferencia inaugural el simposio se ha articulado alrededor de siete mesas redondas con sus correspondientes debates:

1. El futuro de las galerías de tamaño medio en el mercado del arte
2. El delicado relevo generacional en la gestión de una galería
3. Cómo gestionar el legado de los artistas del siglo XXI
4. Galeristas y asesores de arte: cómo deberían colaborar
5. Formas de colaboración entre las galerías
6. Cambios en el mercado del arte online
7. La implicación de nuevos públicos

Y a modo de conclusión un ameno resumen a cargo de Georgina Adam y Adam Sheffer, (miembros del consejo asesor de Talking Galleries) durante la sesión de clausura. ¡Hasta el año que viene!