Stripes, group exhibition

STRIPES

group exhibition with

Helen Bur, Iván Floro, Moritz Moll

Francesc Rosselló, Alex Pérez Moya & Murray Clarke

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

As the vacation period begins, the last exhibition of the season pays tribute to one of the undisputed symbols of summer: the striped print. Today popularized and mainly associated with the maritime sphere, the use and history of this motif dates back to the 13th century and is originally linked to the most marginal and discredited areas of humanity. During the Middle Ages, stripes had an evil connotation and served to identify those excluded from society: prostitutes, convicts, buffoons, executioners, lepers, but it was also the attire that people of lower status had to wear.

In the 15th century it became the primary sign of servile status, and the American revolutionaries adopted it as a symbol of freedom and revolution. During the French Ancien Régime, stripes served to dress the people, becoming the emblem of a miserable and oppressed class. In the iconography of the French Revolution, the anti-clerical and anti-royalist revolutionary people wore striped clothes, which definitely became a symbol of transgression and freedom.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, the tradition of the striped motif was forged on soldiers and sailors, and together with the development of seaside resorts, they enjoyed a more normative, popular and democratized status. Coco Chanel was the first designer to appropriate this motif and bring it into the world of Haute Couture as a tribute to the Breton maritime world. Later in the 1960s, rockers such as the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain proudly wore striped T-shirts and trousers.

STRIPES brings together a group of artists who usually incorporate this mythical and symbolically charged motif from the history of fashion into their compositions. Well-known artists from the gallery public such as Helen Bur or Iván Floro present new works, and we incorporate for the occasion proposals from national artists such as Alex Pérez Moya and Francesc Rossello, as well as international names like Moritz Moll and Murray Clarke, whose work can be seen for the first time in Madrid.

HELEN BUR (UK, 1990)

Helen Bur is a British artist based in Liskeard, United Kingdom. As a muralist, she has been developing her work all over the world for several years. In her large-scale public interventions, Bur evokes social themes always related to the contemporary history of the place where she poses her creations. Her studio works, which she creates in the temporary workshops in which she settles between travel and travel, deal in the same way with problems related to contemporary social narrative. She deploys a realistic and captivating style, full of textures and expressiveness. Her figures, taken in the action of the movement, are represented from the angle of sensitivity and empathy, aiming to create an instant link with the viewer.

Trained in Fine Arts at the Cardiff School of Art, her work has been exhibited in London, Berlin, Madrid, Los Angeles, Paris and Sao Paulo, among other cities. Her walls are becoming increasingly numerous throughout the festivals in which she participates. To name a few of the most recent ones, she has participated in Nuart, in the Norwegian city of Stavenger, but also Upeart in Finland, Ibug in Germany, Urban Vision Festival in Italy, Kufa’s urban art in Luxembourg, Crystal Ship festival in Belgium, I Be Lady O project in Senegal and Start India in Mumbai, among others.

MORITZ MOLL (GE, 1991)

Moritz Moll studied Fine Art between 2015 and 2021 with a focus on figurative painting in the class of Anke Doberauer at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Stray glances, wandering thoughts, distant thunderclouds – Like sleepwalkers, the protagonists in Moritz‘s work take us on a trip into their sometimes calm and sometimes feverish daydreams.

In his paintings, Moritz explores the in-between spaces of the everyday, intimate moments of being unobserved, of drifting away, of concentration. His painting is characterized by a sensitivity to colour and material and is brought to life through layers, textures and loose, sketchy brushstrokes. In his creative process, the intensive examination of form, material and gesture becomes vital for a painting that lives entirely from the exciting interplay of two and three-dimensionality. With his palette moving between the nuanced tones of faded film and the synthetic colours of a Christmas jumper, Moritz sends his viewers on a visual journey.

IVAN FLORO (ES, 1993)

Iván Floro is an artist and muralist born in Mataró, Barcelona. He practices drawing from an early age, but it is during his high school years when Floro begins to paint daily in factories and abandoned places. He decides not to follow a classical artistic training and in 2014 he starts oil painting, which he learns to handle by looking at the painting of the great masters through his computer screen. Soon after, he regularly attends sessions of natural portrait painting together with other friends that are also part of the Barcelonian contemporary art scene. His works mix the influences of artists of the last century with contemporary languages that he adapts to his paintings.

His first solo exhibition took place in 2018, and among the group exhibitions in which he has participated are Creença (2018, Berga, Barcelona), Tapia (2019, Barcelona) and Homeless (2019, Miami, USA) curated by Axel Void, as well as the exhibition Eros in painting today (2020) at the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona, Remembranza (2020) at La Causa Galería, and Erretratu (2022) at SC Gallery (Bilbao, Spain).

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ALEX PÉREZ MOYA (ES, 1992)

Graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2017, Alex Pérez Moya (Madrid, 1992) is a visual artist who develops his work through painting and relies mainly on craft, plastic and process.

With special interest in luminous scenes and primary and clean colours, he seeks and enjoys the sensual qualities of flesh and objects: the voluptuous and sinuous become very important in his images. The most common themes in his work revolve around concepts such as refuge, paradise, abundance, sensory pleasure and childhood. The latter understood as the influence of the interests, perceptions and obsessions he had as a child on those he has today.

His previous and eventual passage through Building Engineering gave him an interest in geometry, which he incorporates into his compositions in the form of calculated architectural spaces and pronounced perspectives. These geometrically idealised spaces contrast with the sensual treatment of the objects and subjects in them, which produces a subtly strange character in his images. At an almost subliminal level, they are perceived as unreal or metaphysical, provoking a certain uneasiness by reminding us of a model or simulation, a sort of artificial and parallel replica of reality. Since 2021 he is represented by Arniches 26 gallery and is currently developing his latest project at LEA (Lab of Experimental Art).

FRANCESC ROSSELLÓ (ES, 1994)

Francesc Rosselló graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. In his works, made from oil and acrylics, the artist depicts his personal universe, in which people close to him, animals, food and cigarettes are represented with a marked personal stroke. Humor has a great narrative weight in his work and is accompanied by a chromatic range of vivid and saturated colors that functions harmoniously. His works are inspired on personal experiences that the artist fragments and narrates from different temporalities and viewpoints. Like a mechanism of alteration. As a mechanism for altering his own reality, Rosselló imagines eventual possibilities through the staging of an alter ego that could well be, and in part is, himself. Through repetition and the creation of different versions of fictitious realities, Rosselló establishes the basis of a parallel reality present only in his works but which, the artist maintains, also exists.

His second to last solo exhibition entitled "I miss you (only on Fridays) Ok, on Saturdays too!", curated by Tolo Canyelles, was in 2022 in Palma with Horrach Moyà, gallery that has represented him in recent years, and with which he participated in the last edition of ARCO Lisbon. Currently, he has exhibited with Pelaires Gallery the exhibition entitled "5 MINUTOS MÁS YA VUELVO" curated by Cristina Anglada.

MURRAY CLARKE (UK, 1992)

Murray Clarke lives and works in London, England. Clarke graduated from Kingston School of Art in 2019 with an MA in Fine Art. His work explores the dichotomy of emotions surrounding the mass marketing and consumption of fabrics and garments. Through her work, Clarke dissects and questions our attitudes and feelings towards such luxury goods by creating paintings that are at once warm and welcoming, yet deceptively cold and superficial.

By duplicating images multiple times in his works, he winks at the mass-produced images characteristic of industries such as advertising. In this way, his work opposes the traditional view of painting as a single subject, incapable of being reproduced, as he presents us with the same image painted over and over again, moving further and further away from its figurative nature. Painted in a realistic style, the paintings lack the artist's presence, so that an almost mechanical coldness usurps the initial warmth and leads us to question our own desires.