ATC Gallery is pleased to announce that the gallery is reopening on June 1st, 2020 with a group show titled des-: Works on Paper. The exhibition will feature works on paper by nine international and Spanish artists. The exhibition will be on view during the gallery's regular opening hours, starting on Monday, June 1st, and will remain open to the public until July 31st, 2020 at its location on C/ Callao de Lima, 39, Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Through various works, the exhibition explores changing meanings, negations, inversions, and deprivations. As we open our doors again, we start to reacquaint ourselves with what was (an interrupted daily routine, a family visit) when what is has changed - in ways that are still unfolding. Reflecting upon the "state of adapting" we now live in - sometimes chaotic, sometimes ascetic, often peppered with an urge to act without consequence and enjoy the immediate pleasure - the exhibition interprets the works on hand through the lens of inversions.
Playing with the prefix des-, the show brings together a collection of disparate works on paper from different artists, loosely describing the work in terms of changeable conditions. In Ofir Dor's work Finger Food (2018), we eat (des-ayunar). We are drawn into a communal meal - plates on the table, entrees, touching, closeness, the din of clinking glasses are alluded to through expressionistic brushstrokes. We are reminded of messiness and the pleasure of sharing a table. In Elod Larom's Voodoo Child #6 (2018), we consider how revealing or covering our faces in public can be a matter of personal safety and highly politicized (unmasking). Has the fear of disguise become the lesser threat to the consequences of being too close? Juan José Valencia's collection of contour drawings - a man suspended in air, luggage with contents - show the lightness of a gravitational escape (un-paste).
As we begin to view art again in physical spaces, our context has transformed and we may read the works in front of us differently. This new condition, this new prefix brought on by a pandemic, changes our root. And we continue forward, calling it the "new normal", but knowing it is far from defined.
