16 December 2010 to 30 January 2011Opening 16 December 2010 at eight p.m.
GALERIA PILAR SERRA PRESENTS AGUA Y SAL, A PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT FROM EVA LOOTZ UNDERTAKEN IN THE TORREVIEJA SALTWORKS DURING 1984, PRODUCED IN LARGE FORMAT FOR THE EXHIBITION, COMPLETED WITH PHOTOS AND SCULPTURES FROM THE SERIES VIAJES DE AGUA.
This exhibition presents for the first time photographs taken in 1984 by Eva Lootz in the Torrevieja Saltworks, with a large format production in order to highlight their sculptural dimension, their spatial scope, in a liberation of the powers of the mineral, extracted by open-cast mining exposed to the sun whose strength evaporates the water from the salt and reveals its dry wounds.
The exhibition also establishes a counterpoint with photographs from the series Andaratx from 2007 and a sculpture in marble forming part of the project Viajes de Agua, displayed by the artist in 2009 in the Casa Encendida in Madrid. As Karin Ohlenschläger points out in the catalogue for that exhibition: “in these pieces, the connection between art and nature is impregnated with an ecological discourse claiming a new dynamic of co-existence and co-evolution of the politics and poetry of water”, in an exercise which Eva Lootz demarcates and defines: “Just as John Cage used to say that he practised music as an invitation to nobility, I would like to practise art as an invitation to lucidity, an invitation to dare to handle freedom which, in the end is saying the same thing. Art can and must multiply the energies of life and make us strong against fear and servitude.”
Eva Lootz (born in Vienna, 1942) studied philosophy, musicology and theatre science, and film direction in the School of Cinematography and Television of Vienna, her native city. She moved to Madrid at the end of the sixties. Together with fellow Austrian Adolf Schlosser, painter and architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg and the philosopher Patricio Bulnes, they created the magazine Humo and carried out various activities in the Buades gallery in Madrid. Her sculptural work, generally consisting of spatial complexes, usually takes physical properties and temporal processes as its starting point in order to stage a kind of grammar of matter (liquids, paraffins, metals, sands), tracing out the way they overlap with history via the process of their being obtained, refined, used and traded, and their sedimentation in language. A work which, since its beginnings, has deliberately transgressed genres and made incursions into photography, sound, writing, clothes design, drawings or video: “Art is the attempt to open spaces through which an unknown current can pass, and not just unknown but also intense. Because to make art is to create fields of excitation, of intensity, of extra-ordinary experiences. And to arrive at that, as well as passion, intuition, discipline and devotion, you also need to learn how to think plastically,” says Eva Lootz who received the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1994.
Standing out among her latest exhibitions are those held in the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro, M.N.C.A.R.S., in 2002. In 2003, in Jan Assad Bacha, Damascus (Syria) and in the Antonio Pérez Foundation, Cuenca. In 2004, in the “Sá Nostra” Cultural Centre, Palma, Ibiza, Formentera and Mahón. In 2005 in Citadel of Amman, Jordan, and in 2009 she exhibited various projects in the Sala Verónicas in Murcia, in the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona and in the Casa Encendida in Madrid. Eva Lootz was awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1994, the Tomás Francisco Prieto Prize of the Real Casa de la Moneda in 2009 and she received the Prize of the Women’s Association in the Visual Arts, MAV in 2010.
Galería Pilar Serra, C/ de Almagro 44, Madrid. Tel: 913 081 569.
Monday-Friday 10.30-14:00/17.30-20:00, Saturday 10.30-14:00.
Free entrance.
Source :artfornews.com
