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

Collection

Sin título [Untitled]

Image caption
NATIVIDAD BERMEJO

Sin título [Untitled]

  • 1998
  • Graphite on paper
  • 209,5 x 183,8 cm
  • Cat. D_276
  • Acquired in 1998
  • Observations: The artist has drawn a series of mathematical operations on the back of the frame.
By:
Beatriz Herráez

There are three works by Natividad Bermejo in the Banco de España Collection: Eclipse (1995), Untitled (1998), and Untitled (2000). They were all made during the same five-year period and reflect the formal and discursive consistency the artist has shown since she began her artistic career in the mid-1980s. This series is from the 1990s, when she was focusing largely on drawing. Here she uses oil, charcoal and particularly graphite in various scales of grey. In her work, the artist reduces the central motif to the simplest and most minimal of gestures. As critic José Martín Martínez puts it, 'Natividad Bermejo's radical approach is to cover the paper in graphite, leaving the central figure blank in an elegant economy of means that entirely foreswears the use of colour'.

In this way, she contrasts the flatness of the representation space with the significance of the central motif. Bermejo's drawings offer a thought-provoking range of nocturnal scenes — explosions, eclipses, electrical storms and constellations — capable of engendering disquieting atmospheres and perturbing the viewer. Operating from a discourse in which poetic aspects and concrete languages are immediately associated, Natividad Bermejo's work forms part of a tradition that strips out any form of ornamentation to concentrate on a rigorous analysis of forms, an austere plastic vocabulary that highlights those elements that she considers to be essential.

Beatriz Herráez

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Natividad Bermejo
Logroño 1961

Natividad Bermejo graduated in art from the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1986, she received a scholarship for Plastic Creative Arts in Non-Traditional Materials from the Institute of Youth. Since 1994, she has lectured in sculpture at the School of Art of Vigo University. In the mid-1980s, she began creating pieces in non-traditional materials such as rubber and polyester, with forms that referenced the poetic and the surreal, inspired by her perception of the multiple manifestations of nature. In the mid-1990s, she shifted her focus to photography, video and installation. However, her most common medium was drawing in graphite and pastels, which she used to cover the paper and make a white figure emerge from the darkness. Bermejo takes scale as a differential concept, translating referential images from a range of sources — scientific texts, the media and personal items — to monumental drawings. Her mimetic representation explores events related to the sublime, chaotic and abysmal vision of reality, combining the hyperreal and the dreamlike in a metaphorical expansion of the object or scene depicted.

Since her first exhibition in 1989, she has staged numerous solo shows in Spanish galleries and exhibition spaces, including Sala Amós Salvador (Logroño, 1994); the Caja de Burgos Art Centre (2008); and the ABC Museum (Madrid, 2012). Her work has also been shown in many group exhibitions, among other venues, at the European Central Bank (Frankfurt, Germany, 2002), the Instituto Cervantes in Berlin and New York (2003) and the Castilla y León Museum of Contemporary Art (León, 2007 and 2009).

Roberto Díaz

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.