Victoria Civera - Vicky Usle - Dual
Galería Maior is pleased to present "Dual", an exhibition by Victoria Civera (Puerto de Sagunto, 1955) and Vicky Uslé (Santander, 1981) at the collective event Art Palma Summer 2024.
The exhibition gathers and opens for the first time a dialogue between the works of two women who, besides being two referents of contemporary Spanish plastic art, are mother and daughter.
In 1980 Victoria Civera prepared her exhibition "In the Blue", for the Museum of Fine Arts of Santander in a studio in the middle of nature, in an old mill next to the river Miera, Cantabria. There she lived Vicky's pregnancy while painting from her corner studio the first circular images. "There came out, spun with pregnancy, the spiral, the umbilical cord, the circle". Civera is talking about that circularity that will be from then on a constant in his work, that eternal return of the spherical as a symbol of time in movement, of change as the only constant. At the end of the 80's he moved to New York where he continued the practice of painting, photography, sculpture, and installations. Vicky Uslé's room in New York was full of painting materials. Her first studio was her bedroom and the hallway of her house. She grew up there from age seven, combining her life between the big city and a village in Cantabria. Buildings and crowds contrast with pastures and silence, two opposing natures that stimulate and enrich her. "The important is that the work is alive and invites us to think and walk through it".
Dual is said of that which brings together two distinct characters or phenomena. Dual is also the name of this exhibition that brings together two artistic phenomena with very different aesthetic characters. Victoria Civera and Vicky Uslé are the only mother and daughter who have exhibited individually at Maior Gallery, and this is the first time that the two have been brought together in the same exhibition as a duo; the selected works show the gaze and the poetics on which their works are founded. From a shared time and space, (that space and that time shared by mothers and daughters), they have opened very different paths with their artistic practice, although both find in painting the backbone technique of their careers.
Three of Civera's works presented in the exhibition show us his most figurative profile, in which the reflection on women occupies the center: three female figures are interwoven by a net that holds and encloses them. The perfectly rounded spheres that frame Civera's works are transfigured into imperfect elliptic shapes suspended on the paper, into ovals that grow inward and overflow outward, like a mother's womb.
Vicky Uslé's decidedly abstract vocation offers us impossible but perfectly intimate compositions. She questions and celebrates the possibilities and uncertainties of the medium, passionately and intelligently illustrating the essential qualities of painting and its construction, beauty, and impossibility. Dual is also the title of four of Uslé's works featured in the exhibition, a poetic understanding and profound sense of sensory experience.
Victoria Civera presented her work for the first time in her hometown, in the Aula de Cultura de Puerto de Sagunto in 1974, since then it has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, England, Belgium, Brazil and the United States. In 2005 the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía dedicated a solo exhibition to her in Space 1 entitled “Under the Skin”. In 2011 the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno did the same with “Sueños inclinados”. Victoria Civera's work is part of the major spanish collections: some of them are ARTIUM, IVAM, MACBA, MNCARS, MACA, CAC Malaga, Bank of Spain Collection, Col-lecció Testimoni de la Caixa, European Central Bank, Kiestefos Museum Olso, Patio Herreriano Museum, Generalitat Valenciana, Government of Cantabria...
Vicky Uslé participated for the first time in the exhibition "El trance de las tijeras" at the Palacete del embarcadero in Santander in 1998, few years before graduating in Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. In 2007 she inaugurated her first solo exhibition, “Take Away”, at MCO Arte Contemporanea, Oporto; many others have followed this in New York, Berlin, Madrid, Santander, Barcelona, Valencia, Pollença.... Her work has participated in exhibitions such as those held at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York; CAC Malaga; The Bruce High Quality Foundation, in New York, and the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo and Beijing. The MNCARS Museum, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Santander and Cantabria, the Cañada Blanch Foundation, CAC Malaga, the European Central Bank Collection, the Luciano Benetton Collection, and the Museum of Pamplona are just some of the collections that have works by Vicky Uslé.
