GILLIAN WEARING
Gallery 1. IVAM. 2015
One of the appendices of the cognoscent subject – lighted to the primordial warmth of the cultural identity and de ethnological criteria – comes as a consequence/tool of self-consciousness: the mask; ceremonial and symbolic object with which the British artist Gillian Wearing landed at the IVAM, during the last third of 2015, setting up the retrospective of her last three decades of work – commissioned by Sacha Craddock – as an exhibition event. Her distinctive style (already recognized and widespread beyond The Birmingham industry, the Sensation generation or the YBA, after her Turner Prize in 1997) moved through troubled and disturbing basements of traumas, paraphilias or hidden episodes (cathartic syrup of confession under the protection of anonymity), handling concepts of kinship between identity and family, truthfulness and falseness, evidence and confidence, questioning about the private and public sphere, the genuine and the artificial. In the end, a major exhibition that left a dazzling remain in my memory in such a suggestive scar.
Jose Ramón Alarcón
MAKMA Revista de Artes Visuales y Cultura Contemporánea
(Magazine of Visual Arts and Contemporary Culture)
