MALAGA.- The Centro de Arte Contemporáneo of Málaga is presenting this exhibition by Pilar Albarracín. Curated by Fernando Francés, Ritos de fiesta y sangre features a representative selection of the artist’s work produced over the last decade and a half. The 10 pieces on display include sculptures, installations, embroideries, photographs and videos. The artist invites spectators to explore different stereotypes of Spanish culture, but from a different perspective. Using irony and references to festivals and folklore, Albarracín examines these typical images that are known all over the world to critique the way in which certain clichés persist in the collective imaginary. With its powerful underlying image of decontextualised, highly symbolic elements, her work leaves no spectator indifferent. The artist lives and works in Seville and Madrid.

“I reflect my ideas in my work; there’s a belief that as an artist you can’t get things wrong, but I feel free. A lot of spontaneity has been lost,” explains Pilar Albarracín (Seville, 1968) when she describes her work. In Ritos de fiesta y sangre, the artist takes a look back at some of the works she has produced in the last 15 years. Andalusian stereotypes and clichés are examined from a different perspective that fluctuates between criticism and irony. Pilar Albarracín’s work addresses themes such as social inequalities, female identity and violence. Using elements that are conceptually simple yet have a strong emotional undercurrent, she provokes different sensations in spectators, none of whom can remain indifferent to the situations that confront them in the gallery.

As Fernando Francés, director of CAC Málaga, points out, “Pilar Albarracín borrows these stereotypes from the past and reinvents them in the present, but with a warning: a cultural legacy taken to its extreme can have unexpected results. Festivals also contain an element of tragedy, tradition also bears traces of modern existence. Neither one action nor the other is exclusive. It is in the age-old rites that live on today that the capacity to create exists, like acts that are inherited, that are constantly repeated, that form part of the cultural legacy that endures in contemporary societies. [...] In this axiom there is a tension that is resolved conceptually through the image and that plays a predominant role. Meanwhile, the impact of what is projected through it transcends what it represents. The artist selects symbols of popular culture and adopts a specific stance towards them, questioning the authenticity bestowed on them by the passage of time. Suddenly, what was originally the excuse or pretext for defining certain identifying traits crumbles before the spectator’s eyes, having been manipulated by the artist. And it does so violently, as if the stage curtain had fallen abruptly.”

As a multidisciplinary artist, she uses video, photography, installation, performance, sculpture, drawing and embroidery to present her vision of the issues that concern her. Meanwhile, she captures the spectator’s attention and provokes different emotions through her use of colour, especially shades of red. In the Sevillian artist’s hands, the stereotypes and image of the Andalusian vernacular adopt a different position. Stripped of their festive aesthetic, they become a vehicle for denouncing the unequal distribution of roles in society, on the grounds of gender or for other reasons, as in the case of ethnic minorities. The artist offers a social and cultural critique in which both humour and tragedy in equal parts serve to underscore her denunciation. Throughout her career, she has skilfully reinterpreted the codes that form the basis of her work, invariably tinged by her ironic vision of reality. Pilar Albarracín exploits the power of traditional images, transforming their elements to turn them into contemporary symbols, as we see in the installation El Toro (2015).

In Asnería (2010), it is the animal’s underlying symbolism that provides the context for the installation. Various attributes are associated with donkeys, but they have always been identified as clumsy and lacking in intelligence. The artist recreates a scene in which a donkey, perched on a heap of books, is engrossed in the act of reading. Thus, Pilar Albarracín ridicules the excessive vanity found in certain art circles by likening the donkey to the art expert. Animals are present in another of her installations (Pavos Reales, 2010) where their purpose is to emphasise changing roles in contemporary society. Using birds—in this case, peafowl—the artist visualises the reversal of the male and female genders by stripping the peacock of his colourful feathers, his most identifying trait, and placing them on the peahen. Lastly, the animal world and the relationship that is established between humankind and nature, but from the subjugation of the beast to human action, is exposed in the documentary Padre Padrone (2010).

Embroidery as an almost exclusively female artistic practice is present in several of Pilar Albarracín’s works. In the series Paraísos Artificiales (2001) and Guapa (2015), this technique is used deliberately to bestow greater importance on an artistic skill traditionally associated with the female universe but which is denied—unfairly, in the artist’s opinion—the status of a fine art.

The irony she employs in her works is occasionally combined with anger, another of the emotions that is portrayed in her work through allusions to elements of times past that live on today. In juxtaposing these contradictory feelings, the artist levels criticism at popular culture and the censorship that still persists in certain circles (Prohibido el cante, 2001-2013).

Pilar Albarracín (Seville, 1968) graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Seville in 1993. One of the most controversial contemporary artists on the national scene, she has attracted great international acclaim. She first exhibited her art in 1997, in Madrid and Seville, the cities where she still lives and works today. Since then, her work has been featured in major group and individual exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, PSI at the MoMA in New York, the Modern Sanat Müzesi in Istanbul, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, and the contemporary art museum Kiasma in Helsinki. She has also participated in several biennials, such as those of Venice, Busan (Korea), Moscow and Seville.