Solo show – Ignacio Alvaro
Opening: Wednesday March 12, Until april 16, 2014
On wednesday March 12th, Wu Galeria inaugurates Laguna, Ignacio Alvaro’s (Lima 1983) solo exhibition that presents his most recent artistic production. In more than twenty mixed media pieces, which include sculptures, paintings and drawings, Alvaro relies on visual memory to analyze historical truths understood as unquestionable when they are isolated from their original contexts. In this manner, the artist transforms archetypes of representation and submits them to corrosion and formal subversion until disfigurement and reformulation of content.
Each piece alters a representative image of Western art history that transforms the traditional into eclectic contemporary products. Alvaro appropriates landscapes as a way of nature apprehension, covering them with abstract paintings; the catholic cross as a synthesis of religious dogmas, and busts of greek philosophers recreated in polystyrene to question the supposed foundations of Western culture. Alvaro makes visible the flexibility of artistic work’s value that subordinate to truths and historical discourses built in front of a lack of perspective and memory. With this exercise, the fragility of the art works and their meaning reveal their quality of manipulable documents.
About the artist:
Ignacio Alvaro [1983, Lima – Peru] is a graduate of Corriente Alterna art school. He was drafted on 2013 by the curator and researcher Max Hernández Calvo to join the Laboratory Project “ Trayectorias Recientes en la Teoría y Práctica Artística Contemporáneas” (“Recent Trajectories in Theory and Practice of Contemporary Art”) that Wu Gallery organized. On 2010 he earned the First Price of the annual competition of Artistas Jóvenes de Cerro Verde (Young Artists from Cerro Verde) in the Experimental category. Laguna is his first solo exhibition and he has participated in various group art shows in the cities of Lima and Buenos Aires.