Exhibitions
Looking grief in the face
At the Arranz-Bravo Foundation, Marian Brea invites you to experience grief through images and symbols in Together Forever, an exhibition open until May 3.
Marian Brea (Barcelona, 1995) is a visual artist whose practice is based on the creation of visual narratives that investigate fragility, memory and processes of emotional transit. Through image, sculpture and installation, her work often explores the tension between literal language and affective experience, as well as the construction of intimate, symbolic and personal imaginaries.
On this occasion, Brea has created a space for reflection on the process of grieving and loss in her new exhibition Together Forever , presented at the Arranz-Bravo Foundation in L'Hospitalet. Based on a personal experience, but avoiding biographical literalism and explicit memory, she places the experience of loss at the center of the story without the need to offer solutions or create judgments regarding this emotional wound, which is presented as an exercise in objective observation.
The project is situated in an emotional and mental terrain constructed through a visual journey composed of different images that avoid linear succession. A series of scenes that appear and disappear refer to the spontaneous appearance of memories in a state close to a dream, where fleeting images lack clarity and are not narrative. The artist experiments with very close-ups, blurs and partial points of view that prevent the viewer from fully understanding the meaning and context of the scenes, relegating them to the position of observer, as if they had accessed an alien mind. At the same time, the aim is to place the visitor in the first person in front of the images to reinforce the feeling of unreality and create a threshold between truthfulness and the dreamlike state, which is assimilated to the sensation caused by the processing of pain.
Symbolic elements are of great relevance in this project, especially the butterfly, the egg and the hands. The butterfly, which takes its most beautiful form at the end of its life, alludes to its complete life cycle and the idea of metamorphosis. The egg acts as a dual symbol, representing both the origin and the end—birth and farewell—, while the hands introduce the body without defining a specific identity and symbolize care, bond and closeness.
The symbolic density of the images is contrasted with the use of words, which also plays a central role in the exhibition and is present through concise phrases such as “let go” or “together forever”. This dichotomy between visual density and verbal conciseness marks the abyss between everything that the body goes through in an experience of grief and what we verbalize to order this chaotic and contradictory experience.
Marian Brea does not aim to offer answers to this vital process, but rather to create a space of accompaniment by placing us in an ambiguous terrain between what persists and what is no longer there. Living with grief is often a solitary and intimate experience, especially in an increasingly individualistic capitalist society, which marks a specific time to face the loss. In Together Forever , the artist offers us a space suspended between emptiness and memory, without being governed by time, as if holding our hand to navigate the farewell from affectivity.
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