The Galería Elba Benítez is pleased to announce the coming exhibition of work by Oriol Vilanova, opening Saturday, November 27th. The show will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Titled Con los ojos abiertos en la oscuridad (Eyes Open in the Darkness), the exhibition will showcase Vilanova’s signature methodology of using traditional picture postcards as a materia prima from which to create contemporary art works that are conceptually layered yet visually delightful. In keeping with this approach, Con los ojos abiertos en la oscuridad will include a large-scale, immersive postcard installation and various sculptural objects that incorporate postcards, while the exhibition as a whole will take the notion of time — experienced physically or metaphysically, as a series of discrete accumulations or as a continuous cycle — as its conceptual point of departure.
Oriol Vilanova’s practice centers around re-contextualizing cultural artifacts — especially (but not exclusively) picture postcards acquired in flea markets — into contemporary art works that generate a critical and yet lively reflection on many of the issues of today’s imagecentric and image-saturated culture. Beyond its conceptual complexity, Vilanova’s work exerts a powerful aesthetic presence, most often in carefully orchestrated installations of postcards and nuanced sculptural objects that celebrate the persistence of the analog in a digital world.
Celebración, 2021 (detail)
