Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB Presents Carlos Garaicoa exhibition open through 1 May 2011.
The Cuban Carlos Garaicoa (La Havana, 1967) is one of the most outstanding visual artists of his generation. He has developed, for some years now, a dialogue between art and urban spaces through which he investigates the social structure of our cities in terms of their architecture. By playing with sculptures, drawings, videos and photographs centred around irony and hopelessness, Garaicoa has found in his installations, for which he often uses a wide variety of materials, a way to criticise modernist Utopian architecture and the collapse of 20th century ideologies, by going deeper into the concept of the city as a symbolic space which appears in the works of authors such as José Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.
Carlos GaraIcoa, exhibition at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
In the first part of the exhibition in Burgos now, as a sort of small retrospective, and since he has already shown in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Caribbean artist gathers some of the works that, taking La Havana as his own laboratory, inject thought provoking comments about subjects such as the failure of modernism as the catalyser for social change and the frustration and decadence of last century’s Utopias.
The second part of the exhibition focuses on a series that the artist began in 2006 with the intervention on photographs showing neon signs and floors from La Havana, which are showed together with videos about this city. Using seven tapestries which accurately recreate—parts of the floor of the island’s capital city, Garaicoa manipulates and brings out of context the trivial commercial messages that they originally presented: thus, the signatures of venerable firms in La Havana, “La Lucha” /The Fight), “El Volcán” (The Volcano) or “La Reina” (The Queen) become “La lucha es de todos” (The fight belongs to everyone) , “El volcán estallará, iluminados, esperamos”(The volcano will erupt, enlightened ones, Let us wait) or “Reina destruye o redime” (Queen, destroy or redeem), as in Haikus that bestows the urban landscape with a new and more critical social meaning.
THE CAJA DE BURGOS COLLECTION. [I+E]2
As a sequel to the exhibtion [I+E] INVESTIGACIÓN + EMOCIÓN (Research + Emotion) held in the CAB and in different rooms of Saldañuela Palace in 2008, the Caja de Burgos would like to present its Art Collection, [I+E]2 made up of the art works which have helped to increase its collection during the last years: 2008, 2009, and 2010. This selection will be exhibited in two showings—the first one from January 28th to May 1st (floors 0 and 1) and the second from May 12th to September 11th (levels 0 and -1)—with the aim of presenting a general view of the works that Caja de Burgos is incorporating to its collection, relevant art works that have been selected from the individual exhibitions organised by the CAB over the above mentioned years.Therefore, they are not isolated acquisitions or out of context, but pieces that, in most cases, have been conceived and produced particularly for the exhibitions in the CAB and which are enriched by the added value of being documents evidencing the artistic promotion led by the CAB over the years. Interviews with the artists and audio recordings of the artists’ guided visits in the CAB will be also shown. Every effort has always been made by the Caja Burgos Art Collection to avoid hermetic divisions or favouritism towards one or another tendency: taking research as a starting point, as well as the contact with new artists and creative proposals, the directors of the Caja de Burgos Art Collection (made up of more than 600 works offering a panoramic view of contemporary art in Spain and abroad from the 90’s onwards), guided on some occasions by intuition or emotions, have outlined the paths through which current plastic and visual creation evolve; an artistic and changing reflection of our society.
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