CCA News
Patricia Esquivias: At Madrid's Reina Sofia
Posted on Monday, September 21, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook
Patricia Esquivias (MFA 2007) has had shows in just the last couple of years in London, New York, Basel, Valencia, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Istanbul, and Prague. She was born in Caracas and currently lives and works between Guadalajara, New York, and Madrid. She is 30 years old.
Her global art career took her this summer to Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, perhaps most famous as the home of Pablo Picasso's Guernica, where she presented a solo show—a video installation—entitled Everything that is not a portion is speculation. It is an unorthodox exploration of Spanish history and idiosyncrasies via everyday situations and pop-culture phenomena.
Video is Esquivias's primary medium. She appreciates its improvisational potential—what she poetically calls "the advantages of imperfection." Her work at the Reina Sofia fluctuates freely between informal essays, mini-stories, conversations, and notes. It is documentary yet performative, synthesizing oral components spoken in English, the artist's extensive research translated into conceptual maps, and image archives.
The work constitutes the final installment of the Reina Sofia's Folklore series, begun in 2006. It is exhibited in one of the museum's marginal, transitory spaces and deliberately highlights this shifting quality of the surrounding architecture, inspiring visitors to question the notion of modernity's linear, progressive, and constant time against the work's own rhythm, marked by slowness and chance.
Esquivias is represented by Murray Guy, New York, and had solo shows there and at White Columns, New York, in 2008. She was prominently featured in the New Museum's The Generational: Younger Than Jesus exhibition in summer 2009.