Eugenio Ampudia, Marlon de Azambuja, Daniel Canogar, Leyla Cárdenas, Markus Linnenbrink, Almudena Lobera, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nico Munuera, Jorge Perianes, Bernardi Roig, Luis Úrculo
23rd Anniversary Group Show
Galería Max Estrella turns twenty-three years old. Even though it is not a round number or a particularly symbolic one, we want to celebrate it with a very special exhibition at the gallery and a series of public interventions during the first weekend of July at San Lorenzo de El Escorial.
“Where the artworks inhabit” is the title of the exhibition at the gallery. This project is a tribute, a gesture of appreciation to the figure of the collector. Collectors may not always receive the attention they deserve, yet they are essential for keeping the Art World alive. The collector, whose reflective, research and comprehensive work has made it possible to create collections that are catalogued, preserved and even acquire pedagogical, philanthropic -and therefore exhibition- qualities.
Collectors are those tidy and careful beings, obsessive without falling into pathology and directly related with what they collect. Collectors who have been guided by their personal taste alongside chance, permanently frustrated for not being able to acquire everything they desire, but possess much of what they fancy. In the words of the great Mexican collector Carlos Mosiváis, “a collector is someone who balances personal taste with instants of display of taste”, and continues “it is not enough for the collector to appreciate a piece, he or she needs to possess it, because he or she needs to feel the possibly that, in any moment it is within sight –even a slight portion, for a burst. This is, ultimately, the greed as well as the generosity of the collector”.
For this exhibition, we chose to implicate the collectors in a part of the process that they are strangers to: the execution of the exhibition, and in some way we have asked them to be the artists for a couple of days by photographing their homes, storages, walls; that is to say, places where their collections are exhibited or preserved. These images will literally wrap the gallery walls in the form of wallpaper, thus closing the circle between artist, gallery and collector.
In dialogue with these photographs, a series of works made “ex profeso” by the gallery artists for the show will be exhibited. These works, that we have named The Beginnings of a Collection are a proposal for new collectors as a tribute to those who are already involved with the Max Estrella project.
Within the celebration program for the gallery’s anniversary we have proposed the artists to carry out an outdoors project, outside of the usual exhibition space. During the weekend of the 1st of July, Max Estrella in collaboration with El Escorial’s City Council have summoned its artists to intervene in public spaces of the city. With the title El Escorial for the Arists, town squares, parks and gardens will be the setting for these showings in which all the neighbors will be encouraged to participate.
