Two exhibitions with an international vocation in Madrid certify the return of dream and narrative figuration
Intersticio and Pradiauto are two relatively new spaces and relatively outside the classic gallery areas in Madrid (also, by the way, the recent El Chico, founded by Javier Aparicio, has earned a place on that expanded map). They are already reaching cruising speed thanks to a coherent and articulated programming and creating a pool of very young artists from here or abroad, but always well traveled and capable of avoiding the risk of self-referentiality in the Madrid world.
In fact, Intersticio opens in Madrid with the help of Sol Abaurrea, Ana Coronel de Palma and Cristina Herraiz as a natural development of the independent space of the same name that Herraiz founded in Bethnal Green, London. This desire for cross-pollination between both cities is also shared by the founder of Pradiauto, Sofia Corrales Akerman, who completed part of her curatorial studies in London and also closely follows the panorama in England.
This is now demonstrated by the exhibitions that have inaugurated both spaces and that coincide in formal lines and in their tastings of the current London panorama. Deep Dive, in Pradiauto, brings into dialogue the works of two artists in their twenties from different origins who studied or live in London. Karolina Dworska studied at Goldsmiths and has just been selected as one of the prestigious Bloomberg New Contemporaries. He works on a pictorial substrate with new textile and three-dimensional printing technologies to give shape to images born from recurring dreams; This dreamlike and non-realistic inspiration coincides with Kin-Ting Li, who trained at the legendary Slade School in London, the most established British painting school. He fuses elements of the classical Chinese painting tradition with a meticulous technique to create vaguely organic and disturbing forms that share the same texture between dream and nightmare.
And they are lines of work that the artists who exhibit at Intersticio share. The room text mentions “the other side” to give the coordinates of the mental space in which his works are located, and this allusion to Die Andere Seite is appropriate, the novel by Alfred Kubin that already at the beginning of the 20th century prefigured many of the leitmotifs. of Freud’s theory of dreams and the unconscious and was later a mythical work of reference for the first generation of surrealists. The interwoven hair structures of Nora Aurrekoetxea, the dream landscapes and dream scenes of Sara Bechter and Augusta Lardy, and the meticulously hallucinatory canvases of Michael and Chillan Ho, also based in London and of Chinese descent, have similar resonances.
