Past exhibition
Victoria Gíl
¿Qué mandáis hacer de mí ?
June 20 - July , 2019
Press release

VICTORIA GIL 
¿Qué mandáis hacer de mí?


June 21 - July 28, 2019
Private view: June 20, 19:30

 

The vision of the human body, feminism and the fallacy of advertising are some of the main themes of her work. Victoria Gil, in the words of Mar Villaespesa, has worked from "a room of her own”, to paraphrase the title of the emblematic essay by Virginia Woolf; elaborating plastic stories in which the individual includes the social - the assumption of the already classic motto "the personal is political" - the everyday is crossed with history and memory, both individually and collectively.

In recent years shelve been working on two series that have as subject two literary authors, both nuns: Santa Teresa de Jesus and Mariana Alcoforado, the Portuguese nun. The parodic gaze is transmuted into heretical by associating fragments of their well-known texts, loaded with a strong passionate charge - The Moors and Letters of Love of the Portuguese Nun- to the representation of these religious figures in positions taken from another classic work: theKama Sutra.

The carnal nature of the authors' writings translates into the pure carnality of painting, which draws bodies and positions with markedly grotesque and puerile strokes of great chromatic strength, recalling the artistic tendencies Art Brut and Fauvisme. The freedom of treatment refers to the interest that Paul Klee showed for the spontaneity of popular art, the rejection of canons and the search for knowledge in spheres of non-rational vision, the source of liberation. To this treatment he contrasts the technique of watercolor, freeing the drawing, and acting with the transparency of the color expanded in high flights as the intellectual thought of Teresa of Avila.

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Collaborative work with other artists has been very relevant in the artistic trajectory of Victoria Gil, taking part on the ‘Gratis’ collective with which she has developed the ‘island of copyright’, ‘Copiacabana’ and ‘Copilandia’, between the mid-90s and 2000.

Victoria Gil is part of an essential group in the history of Spanish art, emerged in the transition, Sevillian artists or artists settled in Seville. Among the artists belonging to this innovative and radical group figure Fede Guzman, Pedro G Romero, Chema Cobo, Agredano, Loncho Gil.

Although she fundamentally consideres herself as a painter, she has also investigated other forms of creation such as sculpture and installation. She has shown her work in Chicago, Hamburg and New York. Houdina, a screen printing on metal that was acquired by MOMA in 1992. Helene Salpenter, editor of the graphic Permanent Press commented: "This is an intervention on a poster of the magician Houdini entitled The King of Wives, I modified the image and sex, making it a queen. to denounce the sexist content of many words and advertisements, socially imposed values"