Corners. Floors. Walls. 2018 I 2019
RAC. Pontevedra, España
Arco Art Fair, Madrid. España
A reconfigured site-specific installation originally conceived on the occasion of Sandra Gamarra’s solo exhibition «Corners. Walls. Floors.» at the Fundaci6n Rac-Ros6n Arte Contemporaneo in Pontevedra, Spain will be on view in the frame of ARCO’s Special Projects program.
That exhibition presented on two different gallery levels a group of life size fragments of another space: corners, walls and floors of LiMac-Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Lima. Sandra Gamarra initiated this migrating museum project in 2002 based on a steady growing collection of appropriated artefacts and requested later, in 2006, the Mexican architecture collective Productora to develop a building accordingly. The collaboration resulted in a museum under the ground, so to speak invisible and located in the midst of a desert, in which a set of sixteen square spaces were organized in a regular grid. As a «phantasy», the museum project never has been realized, but supported the credibility and conceptual approach of Gamarra’s LiMac-collection and holdings. LiMac’s collection itself is above all inspired upon well-known and iconic art works, all of them represented as paintings in Gamarra’s genuine style.
By showing at the Fundaci6n Rae for the first time a conceptual version of the museums architecture, she deliberately renounced to include parts of the LiMac collection and juxtaposed instead four particular art pieces from the Rae collection by Thomas Demand, Louisa Lambri, lmi Knoebel, Sol LeWitt, that reflected once again the precondition of the exhibition display (corners, walls and floors). While all the mock-ups were finished as paintings on canvases, the installation was extremely sparse and empty looking, but full of subtle details. Upon closer inspections, one noticed that these surfaces weren’t monochrome but showed traits, such as traces, stains, holes, damages, and light reflections. As mutants, the spatial fragments itself became works of art.
The somehow Catch-22 appearing approach of Sandra Gamarra’s Rae-project found its climax in an artists’ book that was published for the occasion. It referenced a selection of appropriated and then repainted illustrations from art catalogues, artists’ books and monographs by eighteen different admired artists such as Michael Asher, Stanley Brouwn, Robert Gober, Luisa Lambri, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Karin Sander, Franz Erhard Walther or Heimo Zobernig in which the topics of the exhibition (corners, walls, floors) once again became apparent. As such, the artists’ book appeared to be both a manual and a matrix that framed and re-contextualized this thought provoking installation.
The ARCO booth shows a different set up of the LiMac museum spaces, now in a condensed and reduced configuration. While in the previous location in Pontevedra two institutional spaces and floor plans overlapped each other, the mock-ups are now, due to the limited surface, superimposed and alternated. As a place holder set up within an art fair, this new configuration alludes to LiMac’s origin, to fill an empty space with its own void.
Mortiz Kung
