Baert Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by José Manuel Ciria.
Born in 1960, Ciria is a central figure in the panorama of Spanish painting of the last three decades. During this time Ciria has developed an astounding series of investigations into painting, and has lived and worked in numerous cultural centers throughout the world, including New York, Berlin, and London, but always returning to his hometown of Madrid. it was here, under the pressure to produce pieces for the present exhibition, that he developed yet another body of work representing a new stage in his painterly discourse. In this series entitled Procedures, paintings have not been structured by means of any particular single method, but rather through the implementation of a broad combination of options available to him in terms of technique and iconography. The artist has exploited an expansive inventory of techniques that covers virtually every possibility of applying paint to a supporting surface.
The virtue of the Procedures series lies in the diverse strategies of visual representation the artist has employed to weave a joyous and exultant new narrative free of the constraining geometry that previously governed his work. There is greater emphasis on emotion than thought, intuition rather than theoretical questioning, and the expansion of the image rather than the compositional framework. Here Ciria has taken a rhizomatic approach, exploiting the possibilities of variation, expansion, conquest, capture, and offshoots. The visual result is a map that offers multiple non-hierarchical entrance and exit points, and multiple lines of escape that defy any system of central authority and allows every single element to be linked to all the others.
Throughout his professional career, Ciria has gained a wide international recognition through solo and group exhibitions at prestigious institutions, among which include the Herzliya Contemporary Art Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel (2002), the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow, Russia (2004), the Polish National Museum of Poland, Warsaw (2004), the Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez in Zacatecas Mexico (2005), the PasquArt Kunsthalle Art Center Museum in Bern, Switzerland (2005), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo de Yucatán in Mérida, Mexico (2006), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, Argentina (2007), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile (2009), the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) (2012), the Heritage Museum (MUPAM), Malaga (2012), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MINAC), Bucharest (2012) and the Museum of Modern Art (MAMBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013). His work is in numerous institutional and private collections including the National Museum Art Center Reina Sofia (MNCARS), Spain ; the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM), Spain ; the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain and The Albertina Museum, Austria.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Carlos Delgado Mayordomo and by Simone Krug, translated by Jenni Lukac.
