Category Archives: Contemporary Art

Conference interpreter during the conversation beetween Melanie Smith and Tanya Barson

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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”.

Conference interpreter during Talking Galleries 2018

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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!     g2Q2lLmf_Talking sept16_talking_img2