Groping
CIBRIÁN is pleased to announce the gallery's first solo exhibition of José Ramón Amondarain. He has been a leading artist on the Spanish art scene for decades and belongs to a generation that marks a milestone in the history of art in the second half of the 20th century. It is important to look back to understand the impact this generation has had, especially in painting.
This turning point probably began in the early 1980s with appropriationism, a movement that has been underestimated in the light of recent painting history. Take, for example, the work of Sherrie Levine, who at that time began to reproduce modernist paintings on a reduced scale in watercolours. This gesture literally showed us the different states of the image through painting, questioning of course the idea of the author. Levine's watercolours are all at once copies, recreations, watercolours and originals. All these states are encapsulated in the painting. We are faced with a transfer that converts content into image and image into information. This change in the reading of the painting puts the subject on the same level as the rest of the pictorial components. Davil Joselit articulated this shift when he wrote: "(...) the abstract gesture now marks the transfer of information rather than the production of new information itself, which was the territory claimed by abstract expressionism".