Eulàlia Valldosera trained at the School of Fine Arts at Barcelona University and went on to complete her studies in Holland. In the early 1990s her ‘El melic del món’ exhibition (Antoni Estrany-de la Mota Gallery, Barcelona, 1991) marked the start of her multidisciplinary work combining photographs, screening slides, installations, performance and videos in a very coherent manner. Her work has since focused on the deconstruction of female stereotypes, emphasising that they are based on assumptions and using her own body and image as a means of connecting with the rest of the world. Desire, the beauty of the female body and its commodification by the male gaze, intimacy, the domestic sphere, the construction of identity and maternity are some of the issues that her work critically addresses, fundamentally in her Apparences series of installations.
Many of her pieces use everyday items, including cleaning materials – bottles of bleach or detergent – that advertising has linked to women due to their traditional connection with the home. Those items are converted into metonyms of women and even function as the anthropomorphic shadows – almost platonically or through similarity – of other bodies. They take the place of females in representation and language, and their distribution around the exhibition space draws the viewer into the piece. In the 1990s she also produced a series of photographs in which her body was projected on pieces of indoor architecture so that she was identified with them. The project images of her body were incomplete, lacking certain parts (e.g. in Racó), in order to achieve that assimilation with the architecture. In the early 21st century, her work become more radical and even more intangible.
Eulàlia Valldosera has won the National Award for Plastic Arts (2002). In 2001 a retrospective of her work was held at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcleona and was then taken to the Witte de With contemporary art centre in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Valldosera has also staged solo shows at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2009) and at the Miró Foundation (Barcelona, 2013), and taken part in Manifesta 1 (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1996); the Istanbul Biennial (1997); the Johannesburg Biennial (South Africa, 1997); the Skulptur Projekte (Münster, Germany, 1997); and the Venice Biennale (2001).
Eulàlia Valldosera trained at the School of Fine Arts at Barcelona University and went on to complete her studies in Holland. In the early 1990s her ‘El melic del món’ exhibition (Antoni Estrany-de la Mota Gallery, Barcelona, 1991) marked the start of her multidisciplinary work combining photographs, screening slides, installations, performance and videos in a very coherent manner. Her work has since focused on the deconstruction of female stereotypes, emphasising that they are based on assumptions and using her own body and image as a means of connecting with the rest of the world. Desire, the beauty of the female body and its commodification by the male gaze, intimacy, the domestic sphere, the construction of identity and maternity are some of the issues that her work critically addresses, fundamentally in her Apparences series of installations.
Many of her pieces use everyday items, including cleaning materials – bottles of bleach or detergent – that advertising has linked to women due to their traditional connection with the home. Those items are converted into metonyms of women and even function as the anthropomorphic shadows – almost platonically or through similarity – of other bodies. They take the place of females in representation and language, and their distribution around the exhibition space draws the viewer into the piece. In the 1990s she also produced a series of photographs in which her body was projected on pieces of indoor architecture so that she was identified with them. The project images of her body were incomplete, lacking certain parts (e.g. in Racó), in order to achieve that assimilation with the architecture. In the early 21st century, her work become more radical and even more intangible.
Eulàlia Valldosera has won the National Award for Plastic Arts (2002). In 2001 a retrospective of her work was held at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcleona and was then taken to the Witte de With contemporary art centre in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Valldosera has also staged solo shows at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2009) and at the Miró Foundation (Barcelona, 2013), and taken part in Manifesta 1 (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1996); the Istanbul Biennial (1997); the Johannesburg Biennial (South Africa, 1997); the Skulptur Projekte (Münster, Germany, 1997); and the Venice Biennale (2001).