Throughout this month of November, there will be two exhibitions in memory of artist and researcher Laura Ramírez Palacio (1988-2022), a member of the MoDe(s) team.
At the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid will be held Vínculos y disociaciones. Dibujos de Laura Ramírez Palacio (Sala de Exposiciones de la UAM, October 30 – December 15, 2023). The exhibition gathers the 18 drawings that the Fundación Vasos Comunicantes has donated to the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The Fundación Vasos Comunicante, created by Laura Ramirez, aims to explore the relationship between art and mental health.
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Within this same ambivalence, the strength of Ramírez Palacio’s artworks comes from the contradiction between a very refined drawing technique full of sensorial subtleties -spectral figures of boys and girls frequently appear on a very black background-, and an unfamiliar and tortuous representation of scenes linked to childhood. In these scenes, there is no explicit image of abuse, although the sexualized dimension of girls is not hidden either. Rather, the aim is to represent the violence suffered and internalized by the girls, through figures, objects or scenarios subjected to a dreamlike distortion that makes us immediately enter a sinister world from which we want to escape.
(Olga Fernández López, Patricia Mayayo Bost and Abdiel Segarra Ríos)
At the Espacio PlusArtis will take place Porque no hemos visto. Laura Ramirez Palacio (November 7 – 30, 2023). This exhibition gathers a wide selection of drawings by the artist, most of them never seen before, and constitutes her first solo exhibition in Spain. In this exhibition, Ramírez Palacio’s drawings dialogue with the artwork of the renowned Colombian engraver and draftsman José Antonio Suárez Londoño (Medellín, 1955), friend and reference of the artist, who has made some works for this exhibition, showing the artistic complicity that existed between the two.
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The characters inhabit a fragile terrain where meaning emerges at the limit of visibility, a black and white universe where the images, drawn with virtuoso precision, swing, however, on an inconcrete border between waking and dreaming, between presence and disappearance, between the human and the animal, between the conscious and the unconscious. A forgotten country of archaic sensations, of remote and sweet smells, of merry-go-rounds that spin amidst laughter, of lonely little hands that accompany each other in that lost garden that is childhood. In these “trasmundos” (the title he chose for his latest series) to which Ramírez Palacio’s difficult yet delicate drawings take us, loves are almost always ambivalent: hugs become deadly traps, care is tinged with negligence and horror -as Freud said- hides in the very heart of everyday life.
(Olga Fernández López and Patricia Mayayo Bost)
