ARCOmadrid23.02.2022–27.02.2022Thomas Geiger, Ana Navas
Sperling presents Ana Navas and Thomas Geiger at the Opening section of ARCOmadrid 2022, curated by Övül Durmuşoğlu and Julia Morandeira.
Patterns and Dress-Ups are two series of prints on fabric and textile sculptures by Ana Navas started in 2020 that deal with the residues of the doctrines of art and design and the reminiscences of modernism. These second skins of objects such as plastic bottles, ergonomic mops, baby seats, or a sculpture by Jean Arp are presented three-dimensionally, dressing the original object, or hanging flatly on the wall as if they were Rorschach cards, letting us each see something different. They are made from industrial textiles that depart from the art historical canon and culturally specific techniques (Kandinsky’s late abstractionism, Japanese tie-dye) and to which careful copying is added through the hands of the artist. Ana Navas uses both a historical and a fictional approach to question the relationship between form and function and between “original” and “copy” of objects. In a humorous and inventive way, it shows that what we are – or rather, what is required of us – is constructed and communicated through simple and seemingly harmless objects and behaviors.
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Like many others, I have never visited the world-famous Land Art sites in real life. My idea of them is fed exclusively by photographic documentation.
Jardin Land Art de La Tigra (La Tigra Land Art Garden) nevertheless brings these works to life by adopting a different relationship to accessibility, reproducibility and authorship. It is a collaborative action in which visitors to the La Tigra Performance Festival in Honduras resurrect famous Land Art works in the middle of a tropical cloud forest. Each participant received a photograph of a well-known Land Art work and was invited to reinterpret it with surrounding materials. Together we created in the remote nature of La Tigra a miniature garden that mimics the historical canon of Land Art art and contrasts with the individual, monumental gestures of the original artists.
