Diana Larrea .- De entre las muertas
03/Sep/2020 - 07/Nov/2020
From Among the Dead (De entre las muertas) is the title of DIANA LARREA’s first solo exhibition at Espacio Mínimo gallery. A project which born from her online artistic action “Tal Día como hoy” (“On this day”), a hybrid work of feminist activism and historical research that consists of publishing on social networks the biographies and works of women artists of the past, forgotten or unknown. This intense process of study and dissemination, carried her out over two years, has allowed her to know the work of more than 480 fine art creators from different disciplines, from different cultures, and from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Thanks to this historical review focused on the recovery and revaluation of women’s artistic work, she has found new feminine artistic references to which she feels linked in a strange and permanent way. It is a recent collective imaginary that has been hidden until recently and whose discovery has been a revelation to her. In this process the artist has been able to verify how her personal need coincides with a collective need shared by today’s artists. As if a new artistic movement that she call “Magic Feminism” was born. This new stream of art is in line with our particular contemporary social context and reflects an intuitive way of feeling, connecting the artists of the present with those of the past.
This project is planned as a tribute to all these historical women artists. Based on an appropriation exercise, she has selected 100 self-portraits of great painters from the history of art to digitally modify them and present them to the viewer as if they were records of a phantasmagoria. By way of false cyanotypes she has decided to reproduce the self-portraits of these painters, in the form of a negative and in bluish copies. The result shows a file of historically decontextualized post-photographic images and reconfigured in a new aesthetic to bring them to the present. Self-portraits offer a reaffirmation of the identity of each creator and helps us to better identify with their uniqueness. The mention of the old blueprint procedure refers to the magical origins of photography and is a reference to Anna Atkins (1799-1871), a British botanist, who is considered the first photographer in history. She is recognized as responsible for experimenting for the first time with the cyanotype method and also for publishing the first illustrated book with photographic images. The cyanotypes embodied by Anna Atkins have been a direct inspiration for her when conceiving this project, in how she wants to achieve an effect of printed radiographs. The faces of the 100 historical painters she has selected appear in my proposal revealed in dark silhouettes, and exposed on paper as if they were visions of an apparition.
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