Exhibitions
Álvaro Barrios: Art as a Critical Game in Fernando Pradilla
The Fernando Pradilla Gallery opens the season with The Multiplication of Paintings , an exhibition by Álvaro Barrios that is part of the 16th edition of Madrid Gallery Weekend. The exhibition brings together a group of pieces in which the Colombian artist reaffirms his interest in challenging pictorial tradition and the very notion of the work of art, through appropriations, displacements, and reinterpretations that engage with different moments in cultural history.
Barrios articulates what he calls a heterochronic perspective: a way of approaching Western art that doesn't follow a linear chronology, but rather interweaves eras, styles, and languages on a single plane. Thus, classical iconographies and recognizable passages from collective memory coexist with resources from conceptual art, generating a kind of parallel cartography that destabilizes the canon and opens up the possibility of imagining other aesthetic geographies.
The exhibition invites the viewer to recognize fragments of tradition and, at the same time, to discover how, under Barrios's intervention, those same fragments acquire a new meaning, charged with irony, critical reflection, and a visual poetry that is already distinctive in his career.
From September 11 to October 11, visitors can explore the creative universe of Álvaro Barrios (Cartagena, 1945), one of the most influential voices in contemporary art in Colombia. From his early days as a child's drawing to his consolidation as a pioneer of conceptual art in Latin America, his career has been characterized by constant experimentation and the critical appropriation of both popular and academic languages.
In the 1960s, he attracted attention by incorporating comics into the artistic space, a gesture that opened the doors to pop art in the country and questioned the boundaries between mass culture and highbrow tradition. Later, with his celebrated Espacios ambientals (Ambient Spaces ), he introduced a new way of thinking about art in Colombia, in tune with international trends and in dialogue with figures such as Marcel Duchamp, to whom he has paid ongoing tribute. His work—which includes printmaking, drawing, collage, installation, photography, and, more recently, forays into crypto art—is distinguished by its humor, irony, and his ability to reinterpret familiar images, giving them new, contemporary interpretations.
The Multiplication of Paintings project once again unfolds its complex network of appropriations, poetry, settings, and heterogeneous landscapes. On this occasion, the gallery presents for the first time the monumental polyptych created in 2013, now transformed and reconfigured. The work rises like a Turnerian storm where a group of apostles miraculously rescues from the sea a wealth of artworks capable of filling five museums around the world.
