Teresa Lanceta .- La Alfombra española del Siglo XV (The Spanish Carpet of 15th Century)
26/Jan/2019 - 23/Mar/2019
Espacio Mínimo gallery presents the second solo exhibition in its space of TERESA LANCETA. With the title La Alfombra Española del Siglo XV (The Spanish Carpet of 15th Century), the exhibition includes pieces of different techniques -tapestries, drawings and paintings- and formats, which she has been creating over the last two decades. They are a result of the impression produced by the copies that houses the collection of the Institut Valencia de Don Juan in her first visit and, later, those that are conserved in the Museum of Decorative Arts of Madrid.
The artist writes about the exhibition:
In the fifteenth century in Albacete, Toledo and Cuenca there was a splendid rug industry of Moorish inspiration and execution. The powerful families of the great conquering landlords admired and bought those carpets for their palatial houses. Of serious appearance bordering on sadness, the pronounced frames that constrain the central field and the implantation of the heraldic shields tell us about subjugation, of its creators and of the culture that they sustained. Today, they are testimony to the existence of a culture that shone with its own light.1
In the course of history, the Mudejar compositions were taken back and replaced by other styles, some of which came from Europe. As this process progresses, strength and originality are lost. Contemporary painters reproduced them in their paintings: Pedro de Berruguete, Diego de la Cruz or Jorge Inglés, among others
With La Alfombra Española del siglo XV, I wanted to hold within me the feeling that they produce on myself and extend through my work the knowledge they still bring after so many centuries. In my drawings and paintings, the ornamentation takes center stage to the detriment of the religious scene that these painters represent, which in my paintings becomes darken until they almost disappear. The tapestries recreate, altering it, the geometric repetition used.
Teresa Lanceta, -write Antoni Marí in his text Teresa is not here from Tejidos marroquíes: Teresa Lanceta exhibition catalogue (Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid, 2000)- like any artist, began to practice art because of the force exercised by other artists’ work on her own creative imagination. In this case, however, it is not the work of an individual artist which awakened the artist’s creativity, but an entire collective personality, recognisable despite its countless variants and alterations as a singular and autonomous whole binding diverse individualities into a sole expresive vocation..
About Teresa Lanceta’s work, the curator Nuria Enguita writes in the Introduction of the catalog of her exhibition Adiós al rombo, held in 2016 at La Casa Encendida in Madrid and in 2017 at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, as follows:
In the mid-1960’s, when painting and conceptual art dominated both the Spanish and Catalan art scenes, Lanceta decided to embrace weaving as a medium of artistic expression, stretching the limits of comprehension of what can be considered art. Moreover, she did not approach it from the perspective of critical analysis but started with the formal elements, with the original, inherent aspects of woven fabric: its ligaments, materials, traditions and techniques.
In the mid-1980’s, Lanceta lived among weaving communities of the Middle Atlas. Through their textile traditions –a knowledge passed down from generation to generation- she discovered a collective art that has helped people live, communicate and endure: an art marked by ancient habits, motifs and rules that, when mastered, allow expressive freedom and creativity, recounting the passage of time and incorporating histories and events. Like the overlapping threads of warp and weft, “doing” and “living” share the same time. In these textile traditions of nomadic peoples, the weaves transcend their decorative purpose and symbolic function: they are part of a way of life and, as such, they convey shared, everyday knowledge, deploying their ornamental and artistc power.
(…)
Lanceta has proved that weaving is an artistic tool at the service of the human soul. And, in doing so, she has shown that the so-called ornamental arts are in fact “pure” art, for they entail formal innovations that express innovative ideas. In the Western world, the debate about “art for art’s sake” versus “useful art” grew more heated in the 1980’s, sparked by exhibitions such as “Primitivism” at the MOMA (1984) or “Magiciens de la terre” at the Centre Pompidou (1989), when Lanceta has already been “weaving” for more than ten years.
1 They can be seen in the Museum of Decorative Arts of Madrid, in the Valencia Institute of Don Juan, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum for Islamische Kunst in Berlin, among many others.
TERESA LANCETA (Barcelona, 1951) bachelor of Modern and Contemporary History and doctor in History of Art, she currently teaches at the Escola Massana in Barcelona. Some of her solo exhibitions are La alfombra roja (Museu Textil i d’Indumentaria, Barcelona 1989), Tejidos marroquíes: Teresa Lanceta (Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid, and Villa des Arts, Casablanca, 2000), Tejida abstracción (Modern Art Museum of Ibiza and Museum of Teruel, 2001) and Adiós al rombo (La Casa Encendida, Madrid and Azcuna Zentroa, Bilbao, 2016-2017). Her most important colective exhibitions are De una parte a otra (Guezira Art Center of El Cairo, Lonja de Pescado de Alicante and Musée d’Angers-Université Le Mirail of Toulousse, 2009), How to (…) things that don´t exist (31 Bienal de Sao Paulo, 2014), El contrato (Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao 2014), La réplica infiel (Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid, 2016), Viva, Arte Viva (57 Biennal di Venezia, 2017), in The Live Creature ( Kunsthalle de Mulhouse), Te Toca a ti, at EACC of Castellón, and Aplicación Murillo: Materialismo, Charitas, Populismo (Various places, Sevilla 2018-2019).
Her work is represented in important public and private collections such as the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum in Madrid, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the CA2M Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, the José Cuervo Foundation in Mexico, the Coca-Cola Foundation Spain, Per amor a l’Art collection or the Museum of Teruel, among others.
