Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Abrazo y lucha II [Hug and Fight II]

Image caption
EULàLIA VALLDOSERA

Abrazo y lucha II [Hug and Fight II]

  • 1997
  • Digital copy on laminated paper (Diptych)
  • 198,5 x 249 cm
  • Cat. F_52
  • Acquired in 2001
By:
Beatriz Herráez

The Hug and Fight II (1997) diptych is a sequence of photographs where the relationship can be sensed that is established between the bodies of a man and a woman that come together and move away in two consecutive actions. The photos are purposely out of focus, and pick up and expand the artist’s interest in two central elements of her production: light and the human figure.

The ‘effect’ of light on objects – the projections and shadows that the artist converts into materials for her pieces – generates a universe of complex and suggestive forms in her best-known installations, and light in Hug and Fight II becomes the architect of the dematerialisation of the bodies of the figures; a disintegration that leads to a contradictory and multivalent image that makes the viewer a voyeur, a witness of an uncomfortable situation.

The brochure for the Eulàlia Valldosera retrospective at the Reina Sofía, curated by the historian Nuria Enguita in 2009, stresses the importance of those ‘manipulations’ of the body in the artist’s production: ‘The potential for creating knowledge through the body – her own body – lies at the heart of Valldosera’s art, for it enables her to break away from the constraints of single identities. Starting from this experience she develops processes that allow her to reconfigure herself as a subject, and conceive of herself in relation to others. Action takes precedence over the art project’.

From her most introspective projects, such as The Navel of the World (1990-1991), those places of the body and its relationship with the private and the domestic spheres are at the centre of the devices of the gaze devised by Valldosera. Blurry, unsettling scenes that allude to the invisible violence running through everyday life.

Beatriz Herráez

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Eulàlia Valldosera
Villafranca del Penedés (Barcelona) 1963

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).

Isabel Tejeda

 
«The Hug» (Barcelona, 1998). «Contemporary Art from Spain», European Central Bank (Frankfurt, 2001-2002). «From Goya to our times. Perspectives of the Banco de España Collection», Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Rabat, 2017-2018). «(UN)COMMON VALUES. Two Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art», National Bank of Belgium (Brussels, 2022). «Los nuevos 90» (Donostia / San Sebastian, 2023).
José María Viñuelas Contemporary Art from Spain, Frankfurt, European Central Bank, 2001. Yolanda Romero & Isabel Tejeda De Goya a nuestros días. Miradas a la Colección Banco de España, Madrid & Rabat, AECID y FMN, 2017. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.