Roser by María Aran Rivero
Solo show. Photography exhibition. Fragmented portrait in ten pieces of an end of depersonalized stage. The transit of the person who was to the body that no longer manages to maintain the features of what was. In this process of loss, the artist seeks to unify the fragments, to fix an image of someone as if by means of pieces she could reconstruct it. Among the images there is something of the blurry, suspended between madness and sanity, between the person and the flesh, between being and not-being, which the portrait cannot contain but which somehow manages to untie.
Fire Escape Barcelona February 2013.
#drawmysideface by Paula Bonet
Solo show. #drawmysideface is made up of twenty portraits that together tell a story and that individually tell twenty very different. The exhibition arises from the proposal made through the Facebook and Instagram platforms to send photos in which the protagonists appear portrayed in a perfect profile. To the mail account that was created especially for the occasion came seven hundred and thirty proposals from which were selected the twenty that could be seen at Fire Escape.
Fire Escape Barcelona April 2013.
Kentia by Pol González Novell
Solo show. Participating in LOOP Screen Festival, videoart festival in Barcelona. Fire Escape showcased the video Kentia by the director Pol González Novell. In his precise and austere language Kentia is posed as a conversation in which the artist begins the dialogue and at the same time encourages the viewer to be its interlocutor. The end result is not a film however the idea of a film. This work is part of the Poetics & Politics section of the festival where the political aspect is part of the poetics present.
Fire Escape at LOOP Videoart Barcelona May 2013.
De lo bueno lo peor by CHema Skandal
Pop-up solo show. Illustration and screen printing. The well known mexican artist Chema Skandal arrived from Chicago, his current residence, so Fire Escape presents in exclusive a selection of posters and paintings with the presence of the artist. His work has been exhibited in cities such as New York, Chicago, Paris or London among others. We were very lucky having him at the gallery.
Fire Escape Barcelona May 2013.
Exit by Paolo Martelli
Solo show. Photography. Paolo Martelli, self-taught photographer who lives between Brescia and Barcelona. He started photography because he saw coincidences between lines, colors and people. According to Paolo himself, “I love capturing nothing with a little more”. Exit is composed of 16 black and white pieces that tell the story of the flight of the world of the photographer, in each of the photos leaves room to breathe thus feeding the flight from the air. In the escape the colors disappear and the black and white takes over our hearts.
Fire Escape Barcelona May 2013.
Múltiplos del rosa by Jorge Ochagavía
En el laberinto by Carmen Hurtado
Solo show. Mixed media of engraving and collage. Symbolic images that reinterpret the legend of the Minotaur of the labyrinth of Knossos.
We inhabit our own labyrinths (cities, spaces, holes ) as an initiatory path in the search for the center that is actually the self.
Carmen Hurtado.
Fire Escape Barcelona July 2013.
Emptyland by Jaume Montserrat
Solo show. Illustration. His greatest passions are nature, society and traveling. He draws trying to bend those three worlds. Jaume found inspiration for his project Emptyland while on a flight back home from South America to Spain. Montserrat fell asleep and imagined waking up on an island where he lives for 29 days with other animals. He explains, On this island, there was only one animal from each specimen (kind of like Noah’s Ark). All of them were empty, asexual and immortal. They didn’t need to hunt, nor were they scared of being hunted – so there was a perfect symbiosis. He and the wildlife lived free from worries, and that empty paradise is what sparked these images.
Fire Escape Barcelona July 2013.
Big Exit by Simona Rota
Solo show. Photography. A female figure looks for an escape exit in a simple and neat inhabited interior. This is the guiding thread of Simona Rota’s Big Exit, a photographic series in which the artist uses this figure to reflect on the relationship of the current individual with her closest environment, her home. Exhibition curated by Art Deal Project.
Fire Escape Barcelona September 2013.
Todo está iluminado by Ana Darder
The photographs that form “Everything is illuminated” describe a sharp fall towards depression, pain, sadness and impotence of the author. Long days and months of blindness and overwhelming sadness engulfing the bone. However, these photographs also describe the slow healing of the soul, the beauty that can be found in the simple things of life, the poetry found in nature, in the innocence of children, in the shadows of night. Small doses of light that illuminate and place things in their rightful place; monsters and laughter, fear and joy. Everything is gaining new meaning and little by little that light can calm the spirit and heal the deeper wounds.
Fire Escape Barcelona September 2013.
Hacer la calle by Teo Vázquez
Solo show. Teo Vázquez is a photographer who lives and works in Barcelona. Through this project, he deals with topics such as immigration, the underground economy and civic norms in urban space, giving them a comic and satirical touch.
Photography is conceived as a medium open to experimentation and social and spatial interaction. Based on these principles, his visual creations are representations of characters from the streets of Barcelona: workers who give their services within the limits of legality but who at the same time have become products and attractions of an increasing tourist city. A prostitute, a latero, a salesman blanket, a junkie and an accordion player will be the protagonists of the story.
The photographer highlights this contradiction in his work by transforming these characters into icons incorporated into the public space. A process that starts from personal relationships and collaborations between model and author to produce visual representations of exaggerated and shocking situations.
Printed on a large scale and black and white, his photographs appear on the walls of the city trying to awaken the passer-by from his everyday life. These actions of incorporation of photographs to the material surface of the city are conceived as a means to create social interactions and contrast opinions on the social and economic reality through art.
Through this process, the heterogeneity and complex nature of the city are used as a metaphor in the creation and exhibition of photographs. These are transformed into urban art, becoming part of the symbolic order of the city as material objects. The act of transformation and the existence of these objects (and their parameters in space and time) enclose different types of meanings. The exploration of these meanings at the individual level (photographer, pedestrian, spectator or model) in the public space pursue a final representation of the collective character.
This project is part of the documentary that is being made by anthropologist Plácido Muñoz about the action as part of his research on the use of public space in Barcelona. The project is partially funded by the University of Manchester in the UK.
Fire Escape Barcelona October 2013.
Hilar Fino by 180Hilos
