Àngels Ribé. Alicia Chillida

Àngels Ribé (Barcelona, 1943) was a member during the seventies of the Grup de Treball, made up of conceptual artists who revolutionized the Catalan art scene.

The exhibition of Àngels Ribé at Maxphotos space presents three works dated between 1994-2011 and aims to show the creative activity of Ribé today, combining past and present. It is held in parallel to the exhibition that, from July 14, presents the MACBA, focusing on a review of his work between 1969-1984.

This small exhibition is composed of three pieces with a strong sculptural character, a constant since its inception. "All my conceptual works had a sculptural, volumetric approach. Therefore, my current work is not far from what it was at that time."explains the artist.

The installation Ribé1994-2011 includes the action of the public to complete the work, in this case in charge of sculpting with its step the final form of the rubric, made in marble dust on the floor. With this action, the idea of ego and diluted authorship is symbolized in the signature. Anonymity, the value of the work of art appear as constant debates throughout the work of the artist, who also flees from any gender connotation by using only the surname and eluding the proper name. "It is a piece that speaks of the dissolution of the self, but like any creative act it is an affirmation of life over death." The process of the action appears as a serialized document in slides in the piece RibéRibé, 1994-2011, as did artists such as Jan Dibbets or Hans Haacke in the seventies, who used the sequence to photographically record the transformation in the perception of reality. Ribé uses photography, drawing, sculpture, action or installation as means of expression in his work, with clear references to the body, volume, geometry and nature.

The series of sixteen drawings in Chinese ink on bamboo paper, grouped in Untitled, 2011They represent the passage from the three dimensions of sculpture to the two dimensions of drawing, to the encounter with the plane. They are light and emphatic, in black and white, matter and emptiness. "They look into the distance, towards the light. They are like diving in two dimensions, in an unknown space, between balance and chaos. They express the emotion I want, they are convulsive and serene. They have to do with the ones I did in the seventies, now I know more what I want to transmit". They are situated in a broad line of reflection around space with references such as Oteiza, Chillida, Agnès Martin, Robert Ryman or Michael Snow. "All of them share a élan poétiqueAlthough the formal result is very different, they fly from a very solid and rational structure. Brancusi said that it was not birds that he sculpted, but their flight. As if they were music, the three works presented are intertwined: one responds to and complements the other, like a beat that oscillates between past and present, that dialogues and renews itself.