Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

This exhibition, arising from the framework collaboration agreement with MACA and curated by Rosa Castells, offers a comprehensive overview of Kara Walker’s career over the last four decades.

Walker’s work (Stockton, California, 1969) addresses the themes of violence, identity, race and sexuality in the context of the ongoing psychological wounds caused by the tragic legacy of slavery, offering a critical perspective on history while examining racial and gender stereotypes in contemporary society.

Known for her cut-paper silhouettes, which draw on Victorian shadow portraits, shadow theatre and magic lantern traditions, Walker employs satire and archetypes in works of striking formal beauty to expose the contradictions of national self-image, while casting a sharp, subversive gaze on the art-historical references that inform her practice.

From the outset, Walker’s characters perform scenes marked by chaotic energy and dark humour to explore race, identity, power and desire as systems of oppression and subjugation across centuries and continents. Themes such as slavery, sex and social injustice recur in her work. As Walker herself notes, “I’m always reflecting on current events and the overlap between the historical and the mythical.”

Through drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video and installation, she investigates US narratives and myths – misremembered histories, complicit continuities and violent ruptures. These media allow her to explore representations of race in modern and contemporary art and the need to forge new narratives challenging how history is viewed and understood. Walker’s imagery, drawn from both historical realism and imaginative realms, captivates through emotional intensity, intellectual depth and striking visual beauty.

This exhibition brings together numerous works by Kara Walker from the Michael Jenkins and Javier Romero collection at MACA. Forty-four pieces span her entire career, constituting one of the most comprehensive collections of her work held by European institutions.

Displayed works include drawings, prints, sculptures, artist books and one of her latest videos – 31 works donated to MACA in 2021, alongside 13 additional pieces loaned from New York in 2024 for this exhibition.

This is the second dialogue with ‘Pinazo: identidades’, developed through the work of Sofía Alemán and presented within the exhibition’s Anonimatos section.

 “Lo-que-ocurre (What-Happens) is an exploration of the concept of the crowd, approached through the image and its display. Through the process of estrangement that arises from observing collective events, this visual device takes that estrangement and presents it from two perspectives. Sometimes, the point of view is situated within the crowd itself, so close that the object of observation is entirely omitted. The gaze, moving through the space, drifts into the margins and lingers in in anticipation. At other times, however, the power of the event is triggered. The gaze, fully immersed, reveals how the collective presence itself can become an event. ‘They happen within the point that expands,’ and now, I too, belong.

 In a context where even the slightest experience of belonging to a collective is increasingly obstructed by systemic violence affecting the conditions of urban life, relational space becomes alien. Yet it is within the power of the singular, contingent event – acting as a counterpoint to the determinism of structured events – that the potential for action and subjectivity within the collective resides.”

Sofía Alemán

They gaze at a point, a fence, or an avalanche
something that has happened, something that expands,
it calls to them, draws them in, they enter the fence
and happen within it as I watch,
they happen within the point that expands,
it draws near, it pulls me in, and becomes another gaze
that watches us all and writes what you
have just looked at.

Chantal Maillard, Matar a Platón, p. 39

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, 1937) is a leading figure in conceptual art in Spain. He has received the highest awards granted for his artistic work, such as the National Award for Plastic Arts in 2007 and the Velázquez Award in 2015.

The exhibition presented by IVAM in its Gallery 3 offers the opportunity to explore the artist’s most recent work. The show presents s series of 40 drawings entitled The Movement of the Idea, in which Valcárcel Medina investigates perceptual ambiguity and interpretative multiplicity as central themes of his approach. The images are duplicated, overlapped, and contrasted, complemented by brief texts in which the artist, with irony, points out the boundary between his intention and the viewer’s interpretation.

Alongside the exhibition, an editorial project is introduced that thoroughly documents the artist’s work from his early years in the 1960s, while also providing a critical reflection on his more recent trajectory.

The exhibition is curated by José Díaz Cuyás, Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of La Laguna, Coordinator of the research group TURICOM: La experiencia turística: Imagen, Cuerpo y Muerte en la cultura del ocio, and of the research project La modernidad paradójica: experiencia artística y turística en la España desarrollista (1959-1975). Since the 1980s, he has been giving lectures and publishing articles in specialized magazines.

He was the director of Acto eds; his recent publications include «Algunas ideas sueltas sobre viajes, rutas y desvíos», Muntadas. Ejercicios sobre memorias pasadas y presentes, Ateneo de Manila and CAAC of Seville, 2022; and Arte, consume y transgresión caníbal: a propósito de Yves Klein, Tennessee Williams y el cine exploitation, in Encuentros salvajes: arte, consumo y turismo caníbal, Concreta, 2022. In 2002, he curated Going and Coming by Valcárcel Medina at the Tàpies Foundation.

Collaborates:

The language of comics has found an ally in formal experimentation for its continuous evolution over the past century. This has reinforced the versatility of the medium, which has adeptly absorbed influences from a wide array of sociocultural and artistic references.

The consolidation of fanzines and self-publishing as an experience of authorial freedom, offering horizontal and transversal access, has accelerated the pursuit for new formal possibilities. In the early 21st century, this evolution was solidified with the emergence of fanzine and self-publishing circuits in the form of collectives and festivals, which have fostered prolific experimentation with the language of comics.

Fanzines represent the first step towards bold proposals aimed at breaking the moulds of a medium strongly bound to traditional forms of expression, which are inherently linked to the commercial nature of the projects. The absolute freedom championed by fanzines and self-publishing removed these constraints, enabling the exploration of diverse contributions that have fully transcended these self-imposed boundaries.

In recent years, the focus has shifted beyond merely exploring the graphic style of fanzines: themes have radically expanded to embrace a wide range of contributions, introducing innovative perspectives that break free from narrative restrictions. These developments delve into abstraction, question the material nature of the comic itself, and explore new ways of presenting it through mediums entirely unrelated to paper.

The exhibition This is not a comic! Fanzines: the avant-garde and innovation of comics seeks not only to provide an overview of the new expressive potential cultivated in fanzines through the work of over forty authors, but also to explore the creative dynamics driving these changes and discoveries. For this reason, an integrative programme has been designed that combines exhibition, creation and engagement, moving beyond the traditional showroom to present a living exhibit in constant transformation.