Verónica Ruth Frías

Verónica Ruth Frías - I am an artist

Technique: Digital photography

Artist Biography: Verónica Ruth Frías (Spain, 1978) is a contemporary Spanish feminist artist based in Málaga, who forms her works through performances in which the body is subject to the work. She graduated in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville. Appropriation, costumes and tattoos are some of her tools with which she places her body at the service of art and transforms the personal into artistic practices. Sarcasm, irony and humour are fundamental for the artist, although she deals with very serious subjects such as the construction of the feminine, motherhood, violence against women or discrimination against women in the history of art. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including Super M at the ECCO in Cádiz, Narraciones Extra(ordinarías) at the ABA Art Gallery in Palma de Mallorca and Yo quiero mucho a mi mamá at the Tula Prins Gallery in Córdoba, He has also received grants and awards such as the INICIARTE Production Grant from the Andalusian Regional Government, the Rafael Botí Grant from the Rafael Botí Provincial Foundation of Plastic Arts in Cordoba, the prize in the DESENCAJA Plastic Arts Competition in Malaga and the prize in the 10th Pepe Espaliú Plastic Arts Competition, also in Cordoba.

 

The Guests I AM A WOMAN arises from one of the critical principles of current feminism, the inversion of gender roles as a tool for analysis and a channel for female empowerment. Long before Veronica Ruth Frias took this sentence to the category of a work of art, the artist Glenn Ligon did the same from his condition of black and homosexual male from the words I AM A MAN, a simple proclamation that nevertheless treasured a long meaning coming from the claim of some African-American strikers in Memphis (1968). Glenn Ligon transferred the banner to canvas with no stylistic issues other than the typography of the original, black on white. Veronica traces the principles of the artistic corpus I AM A WOMAN as a direct consequence of those assumptions, this time (half a century later) to assert that it is necessary to speak from the condition of woman. In all walks of life, of course, but particularly in the art world, where women hardly have access to quotas of power in management, as well as in curatorial selections in museums and exhibitions, or in the rigorous filter of specialized books and art reviews. It is precisely the written word that has ignored the female gender, favoring male pseudonyms or simply invisibility and oblivion, one of the most effective barriers to which women creators of any era have been and continue to be subjected. During the past 2018 we read with stupefaction the octogenarian Georg Baselitz boasting about the inferiority of the female sex when it comes to artistic creation, justifying the obvious inequalities between the collecting of artists of one gender and the other. The market is right. Women simply do not pass the test. It is difficult for us to admit that in the present time, the position of the artist, crowned with success, is used to validate a syllogism of sinister totalitarian roots. I AM A WOMAN functions as a choral project in which the artist involves women from different socio-cultural environments, through a range of complementary actions that are still in development and in gradual expansion, from the premise of the virality inherent to all forms of activism in the present. By inviting women to be portrayed with these new slogans of emancipation and visibility, or to be tattooed with them, he emphasizes what has become one of the main keys of the current feminist movement: sisterhood. They made the message their own and transcended the initial performative vocation, to constitute with their own bodies a kind of non-static exhibition. The guests Russian Museum of Malaga Project curated by Pedro Alarcón and Angeles Ramos Santiago. See video in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uHZHUbRbT0