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

Collection

Sin título [Untitled]

Image caption
VICTORIA CIVERA

Sin título [Untitled]

  • 1992
  • Oil and vinyl glue on canvas
  • 76 x 56 cm
  • Cat. P_511
  • Acquired in 1992
By:
Carlos Martín

Victoria Civera’s four works in the Banco de España Collection are from the time when the artist – who had been living in New York since the end of the previous decade – formed part of a clear internationalisation of Spanish art coinciding with the return to democracy in Spain and the search for standardisation through culture. Without turning her back on “painting for painting’s sake”, Civera began to experiment again in the 1990s, to embrace an objectual nature, as can be seen from her use of wire mesh in Untitled (1992), an example of the trend towards circular composition that was already visible in her work in the early 1980s, as well as a material change that would steer her from then on to installations beyond painting in the strictest sense, a gesture indicative of the formal hybridisation that has characterised her work.

The three purely pictorial pieces reflect a personal repertoire favouring austerity, where the organic and geometric dialogue in harmony, and the linear and apparently rigorous abstraction appears to be constantly challenged by a certain gestural and, sometimes, biomorphic nature, as can be seen from the forms that evolve in Tel tech (1992). The preference for the small or medium format, typical of Civera of that time, reveals an interest in the intimate and a sensitivity that would then become an approach to a certain iconography of what it means to be female and the forms of cultural significance. Yet it is also related to the focus, during that period, on unrushed painting in which the expressive is sacrificed to the reflective, where Civera distanced herself from the debate between abstraction and figuration.

Carlos Martín

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Victoria Civera
Puerto de Sagunto (Valencia) 1955

Victoria Civera studied Fine Arts at the San Carlos School of Valencia from 1972 to 1977. She then began to experiment with photography, photomontage and happenings, but it was in painting that she found her most common medium of expression. In the early 1980s, she first began including circles in her work, with figures trapped in spirals, rough and tarnished paintings fluctuating between certain neoexpressionist influences and abstract symbolism. In 1987, after moving to New York, she found her own language. Civera combines figuration and abstraction creating tensions between the natural-artificial and the functional-dreamlike, incorporating new materials such as cotton, linen, silk, velvet, wood and metals, objects that she used to expand her field of action to sculpture and installation in the 1990s. Her works have a strong anthropological charge, in the form of an essentialist feminism, where the depiction of women and the intimate and social or cultural spheres in which they operate play a key role, projecting her own vision of what it means to be female and thus her own fears, desires and memories.  

Victoria Civera began exhibiting in the 1980s and has taken part in important group exhibitions, including ‘Cocido y crudo’ [The Cooked and The Raw], at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1994); ‘Mudanzas’ [Moves], at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, 1994); ‘Human Nature’, at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, 1995) and ‘Big Sur’, at the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2002). She has staged solo shows at Palacete del Embarcadero (Santander, 1994); Le Quartier Centre d’Art Contemporain (Quimper, France, 2000); La Gallera (Valencia, 2000); Space 1 at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2005); Condes de Gabia  Palace Exhibition Centre (Granada, 2006); Malaga Contemporary Art Centre (2010 and 2015); and Valencia Institute of Modern Art (IVAM, Valencia, 2011). Her accolades include the 1993 Critical Eye Award for the Visual Arts, the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts in 2014 and the Medal of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2017.

Roberto Díaz

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