SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE.- TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes presents A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth, a new exhibition by Pérez y Requena, opening on July 3. Co-curated by Latitudes and Néstor Delgado Morales, the exhibition brings together sixteen newly commissioned works conceived specifically for TEA. The exhibition will remain on view through October 18, from Tuesday to Sunday, and public holidays, 10am–8pm.
A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth explores overlooked dimensions of the city, approaching Santa Cruz de Tenerife as a fragmentary and restless archive shaped by memory, territory, fiction, and visual culture. Developed through decades of walking, collecting, and recording, the exhibition emerges from the artists' long engagement with the area now occupied by the museum, a site whose urban transformation erased not only buildings but also ways of inhabiting the city. Once associated with travelling fairs, bars, improvised architectures, and clandestine encounters, this territory survives today through scattered traces, rumours, and residual images. Rather than reconstructing that lost landscape, the exhibition proposes a possible editing of its fragments.
The works assembled here operate as partial scenes rather than complete narratives. Discarded photographs, architectural echoes, obsolete decorative patterns, sculptural interventions, and drawings coexist as unstable evidence of stories that resist closure. Through strategies of copying, erasure, montage, distortion, and annotation, Pérez y Requena do not seek to recover an authentic past or illustrate an urban history. Instead, they reveal how memory persists precisely through discontinuity, omission, and absence. The exhibition unfolds less as an archive than as a sequence of visual propositions in which each work opens onto another possible reading.
Drawing occupies a central role throughout the exhibition, not simply as a medium but as a way of thinking. Positioned between lived experience and knowledge, it becomes a method for tracing what remains embedded in places after their apparent disappearance. Straight lines and meandering curves, urban planning and informal occupation, documentation and imagination intersect to produce a cartography where memory is neither fixed nor nostalgic but continuously rewritten. What emerges is a city understood as an unstable surface upon which recurring desires, anxieties, and forgotten stories continue to leave their marks.
Israel Pérez (b. 1975) and María Requena (b. 1978) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna in 2000 before completing Diplomas of Advanced Studies in Painting at the same institution, where they currently teach. Their collaborative practice intertwines research and artistic production, activating relationships between sculpture, drawing, installation, and urban drift. Recent group exhibitions include Nudos y enredos 2/5 (Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife, 2025–26), Pintura enojada (Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, 2024–25), Concretos (TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes and MUSAC, 2022–23), and No news, good news (CAAM, 2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Conquistador (Galería BIBLI, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2022) and The Fall (Sala de Arte Contemporáneo, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2017). Their work investigates the overlooked geographies of the contemporary city through an expanded sculptural and graphic language that combines archival research, observation, and spatial intervention.
