NEW YORK.- The Gabarron Foundation presents “Miriam Wosk - Bigas Luna: Collar de Moscas”, a two-person exhibition featuring large-scale paintings and collages by Wosk, and an installation that includes a short, experimental film by Luna. The exhibition will be on display from June 6th through August 28th, 2008 at 149 East 38th Street, New York. The Gallery is open Monday - Friday 9:00 am - 5:00 pm by appointment at (212) 573-6968. The opening reception will take place on June 4th, 2008 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Bigas Luna, the esteemed Catalan director, is perhaps best known for his sexy, provocative films exploring Spanish machismo, including the infamous Trilogía Ibérica with Jamón Jamón (1992), Huevos de Oro (1993) and La Teta Y La Luna (1994). Luna began his career working with the design company, Estudios Gris, in the late 1960s, and continues an interdisciplinary practice, exploring interests in conceptual art and surrealism through paintings and photography.
Luna’s installation consists of a long wood table that has two, inverted, large, glass jars at either end. The jars contain apples – one fresh and the other decomposing. In between the jars, Luna has placed eroding rocks and two hand saws that have been imbedded into the table. Behind the table is a monitor on a wall made of simple wood boards. The monitor will show Collar de Moscas, 2001. Originally created for the internet, (notodo.com film festival) Collar de Moscas features a minute-long loop of black-and-white footage in which a woman threads live flies onto a necklace with her bare hands. Luna describes: “...she discovered the exact spot to introduce the needle for threading them so that they wouldn't die. In this manner she made necklaces of living flies and went into raptures over the divine feeling that the rubbing of the desperate legs and the trembling wings produced on her skin." This poetic text relates as well to the work of his old friend, Miriam Wosk, whose work is also included in this show. Wosk’s elaborate, mural-scale paintings and collages of flora and fauna, and Luna’s film underscore the fantastical relationship of humans to nature, which Wosk has explored in her work for decades.
In the seven large-scale paintings, collages and tapestry gathered here, Wosk conjures a world both animate and dream-like, combining reconfigured diagrams of anatomical bodies (mammal, reptile, fish, etc.) with lush jungles of pattern and color. The fecund bounty, derived largely from irregularly torn and cut-up vintage wallpaper and antique natural history charts, further embellished with jewels, glitter, organic and artificial materials, foils, paints and mixed media, are sensual antidotes to mortality that also recall the 17th century tradition of Vanitas still life.
Wosk’s works dazzle the viewer with the extravagance of their labor for just this effect; their excess alluding to the futility of earthly pursuits, while also reminding us of just how precious life is. Elegiac and celebratory at the same time, they reveal the artist’s desire to, as she puts it, “explore the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the human experience, life’s beauty and its shadow.”
Miriam Wosk has exhibited her work recently at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, in the solo-exhibition “Euphoria: Paintings By Miriam Wosk”. A book on her work Sequins and Skeletons, The Art Of Miriam Wosk was published in 2006. She is represented by Billy Shire Fine Arts in Los Angeles, California.
The Gabarron Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts has been serving the Spanish and American communities since 2002 promoting the Spanish and Latin American Arts and Culture in the States through exhibitions, seminars, lectures... The Carriage House Center for the Arts also serves as a meeting point for people, organizations and governments to promote the exchange of world cultures. This non-profit foundation has been working closely with diverse organizations from America and Europe.
