Serie Paisajes (Reconstrucción) (Landscape Series [Reconstruction])
- Date
1980
- Technique
- White terracotta and rope on board
- Dimensions
- 118 x 85 cm
- Year of entry
- 1988
- Registration number
- AS06926
- Observations
Entry date: 1988 (from the redistribution of the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo [MEAC] collection)
- Credit
Donation from the Exhibition of Young Scholarship Artists 1980, 1981
Carmen Calvo was one of the artists selected by curator Margit Rowell for the New Images from Spain exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which took place in 1980. From her beginnings as a painter, she brought a unique materiality to this medium by introducing ceramics and clay onto the canvas. Her insistence on the fragment as an aesthetic derives from her
interest in archaeology, and it is this attention to everyday objects as carriers of a!ect that enabled her to become one of her generation’s top artists.
The production process for the series Paisajes (Reconstrucción) consisted of firing, breaking, colouring and gluing or sewing each clay piece onto the canvas. The landscape of the title is configured through the repetition of elements of a place’s material culture, presented through an expository language similar to that which a collector uses to compile their repertoire. Miquel Navarro, another top Valencian sculptor of Calvo’s generation, shares this postmodern poetics of breaking down the statue’s traditional unity into multiple fragments.
Carmen Fernández Aparicio