It’s too late to feel fear.
The aesthetic dimension starts to define everything.
In the era of the hypershow unknown, unexpected, and out of control scenarios are opened. New autonomous and solidary performances arise. Clear ideas are needed and they are somewhere. Sound ideas that would be able to transform everything.
The interactive networks, suddenly, stop being virtual and transform themselves into something real and powerful. An encapsulated fluid that moves and takes the shape of the container that contains it. It is there, but it only gets to its destiny when a force sets it free and defines it. A rebel impulse, brave and non deferrable, provokes the change. It is a ludic and functional act at the same time.
Nothing is more disturbing than feeling, with impotence, to the movement of the grass below the feet. The ones who prefer the injustice to the disorder can’t stand the pulse of progress of those who express no other destiny than to weigh their own disordered, convulsive and chaotic forces.
The risk is the message.
After eight years without exhibit at this space, Max Estrella Gallery opens the exhibition season with the work of Eugenio Ampudia.
The whole of his works is a tragic portrait of our Zeitgeist, that reports on a very precise moment of which we are, in many cases, unconscious witnesses: the one of a change in cultural paradigms, the one of a crisis of the privileged position that occupied, until lately, the high culture, as well as its products and the places where it was traditionally broadcast.
In his last works, Ampudia bases in an intelligent combination of formal risk and conceptual solidity, breaking in a daring way the limits between the audiovisual media and the practices associated with installations and sculptures.
Eugenio Ampudia (Valladolid, 1958). Currently, he is one of the most renowned Spanish video artists. His multidisciplinary work received in 2008 a residency at The Delfina Foundation (London) and the AECA Award for the best living Spanish artist represented in ARCO08.
His work investigates, under a critical attitude towards the established art system, the very idea of the artistic process, both the meaning of the work itself and the traditional mechanisms of promotion, and the interpretation of its contemplation. His task thus focuses on the constant questioning of the creative process as the way of transmitting ideas and the artist as the manager of these ideas and their communication systems.
His works have been internationally exhibited in institutions such as the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany); Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, Jordan; Museo Carrillo Gil, México; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston (MA), United States; Ayala Museum, Manila, Filipinas; MNCARS, Madrid; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Tabacalera, Madrid; MUSAC, León; Museo ARTIUM, Vitoria; Arts Santa Mónica, Barcelona; and in biennials as the one of Singapore or La Habana, la Bienal del Fin del Mundo. They are also part of collections such as the ones of the MNCARS, MUSAC, ARTIUM, IVAM, La Caixa, Fundación Pilar and Joan Miró, DKV and Olor Visual, among others.
2015 is becoming a tipping point in his career: at he beginning of the year with Ampudia’s impressive installation Cada palabra es como una innecesaria mancha en el silencio y en la nada in Abierto X Obras, at Matadero Madrid (installation that will go to the OK Centrum of Linz); followed by his retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of La Coruña and his participation in Beyond the Tropics, an exhibition framed in the 56th Biennale di Venezia. The past July started the roaming of El futuro no es de nadie todavía, a solo exhibition that will travel around many mexican and colombian museums: the Centro de las Artes of Monterrey (July – October 2015), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Oaxaca (November – December 2015), the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil of México DF (January – February 2016) and the NC Arte in Bogotá, Colombia (dates to be established).