Raúl Artiles (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1985) lives and works between Gran Canaria and Munich. He has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna, and completed his Art studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Braunschweig (Germany). Generally, he works in large formats, presenting charcoal paper installations with which he intends to dismantle the academic and nineteenth-century vision that assigned drawing the role of a minor work, dependent on other disciplines. His imaginary landscapes, constitute fugitive visions, dominated by catastrophic approaches or apocalyptic visions – not without irony – suggesting a metaphor for the current economic and political situation. Among his solo exhibitions, we highlight I Was Here at the Contemporary Art Hall in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2019), Black Hole, at the CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canarias (2015) and Souvenir. Remains of the Shipwreck, in the former convent of Santo Domingo de La Laguna, Tenerife (2012).
Bartolomé Rey (Pinilla de los Barruecos, 1964) studied drawing at the Academia del Consulado del Mar in Burgos. Since 1988, when he opened his first solo exhibition, he has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in galleries in Spain, France, Portugal, the United States, Germany and China, as well as in national and international art fairs such as Artcologne (Cologne), Artesantander and Artsevilla. In the series Cosas que pasan (Things that hapenned), started in 2020, the author explores the limits of reverie. Reality understood as a pretext, from which to cement the elaboration of paradoxically subjective sensations and interpretations.
Manuela Tabarés (Madrid, 2000). Graduated in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, Manuela lives in Prague with a scholarship from FMM to study at the British school Prague College and develop her master's degree. She is a resident with a scholarship from the Jacaranda (September 2022) and from the commission of the itinerant collective residency 3x3=6 (July 2023). She has received training beyond the university circle, such as at Alejandro Chamorro's specialised jewellery school (September 2021-July 23) or at the four-month drawing workshop given by the artist Raúl Domínguez (Bilbao 2021). He has also participated two consecutive years in the V and VI Edition of the "José Carralero" School of Landscape Painting (July 2022 and 2023). During his degree studies he has collaborated in several group exhibitions such as Anatomopoeia. La enseñanza de la anatomía artística en el siglo XXI, held in Ávila in the halls of the Palacio de Los Serrano of the Fundación Caja Ávila (July 2022) and has several pieces in the deposit of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Department of Drawing and Engraving.
In recent years she has also devoted herself to teaching. Her teaching programmes include Jewellery: drawing musical instruments in space and Plastic Consciousness, as part of the About programme, in Bamako (Mali, May 2023), at the National Institute of Arts (INA).
Manuela's work is closely linked to drawing; to spatial and sound representation.It is part of her daily practice and serves as a support to structure her abstract thinking.
Sofía Jack (Figueres, 1968). She graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and later furthered her training with Gerhard Richter, Zush, Vito Acconci and Katherina Sieverding. She has also received various grants, including those awarded by the Fundación Barrié de la Maza (HDK, Berlin), Unión Fenosa and the Academy of History, Archaeology and Fine Arts in Rome, as well as prizes from the Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Italy) and the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos de Madrid.
Throughout various projects he addresses the complex and uncomfortable negotiation between utopia and reality. In his charcoal drawings he recreates places that incarnated modern rationality in order to investigate its reverse side, and how the human -desires, fears, affections and feelings- cracks an idea of reason and order that becomes utopia. Sometimes they are imaginary solutions - machine-houses capable of adapting to the needs of their surroundings and their inhabitants- or else they are spaces of rationalist architecture in which he develops a psychological, emotional and affective fact, as a mirror of our personal and non-transferable life story.
His work is represented, among other institutions, in the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the CGAC, the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos de Madrid, INJUVE, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Unión Fenosa, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Diputación A Coruña, Fundación la Caixa, Museo Patio Herreriano, Comunidad de Madrid or the Colección de Arte Contemporáneo de la UNED, as well as in numerous private collections.
Ignacio Lobera (Logroño, 1989) has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Cuenca and a Master of Research in Drawing from the University of Granada. His work, deeply rooted in an abstract transcription of reality, is based on and revolves around drawing. The line is at the center of a research process that condenses graphic elements to enhance their expressiveness, through movement and space. Conceptually, his works usually reveal archetypes and mythological arguments, which evoke our most atavistic emotions, and are presented in a mise en scène where we are complicit in new ways of understanding, among others, the model par excellence that has been the object of study in drawing; the human figure.
Since 2019 he alternates his studio in Madrid with the Jardin Rouge artistic residency at the Montresso Art Foundation in Marrakech. He has exhibited at the Real Círculo de Bellas Artes with the Guasch Coranty Foundation (Barcelona, 2023); Montresso Art Foundation (Marrakech, 2023); Lage Egal gallery (Berlin, 2022); Museo Casa de los Tiros (Granada, 2015); Rafael Pérez Hernando gallery (Madrid, 2013); and the Antonio Pérez Foundation (Cuenca, 2012).
Ignacio Lobera's recent work is based on his interest in the representation of the body. The main lines of plastic production and research that he is carrying out are the formal dephysicalization of his body and the study of the material characteristics of paper; and, specifically, the expansion of the drawing from its transfiguration from plane to round lump. His starting point is the vindication of drawing, its redefinition as a transversal – or autonomous – discipline and the abstraction of the human figure through different deconstruction exercises. A practice where he synthetically interprets the figure in plane, to represent it in volume, and where this transfiguration generated by expansion creates a space that provokes movement. Then a performative act arises –or an intimate relationship between the paper and the artist– which, as in any relationship, entails an adaptation between the interest and the possibilities of each of its members.
To do this he uses materials that he gives a new meaning through his manipulation, a process in which the senses that awaken in his hands intervene: the aridity of the carved chalk; what the feel of it is like when rubbing it against the verjury; the sound of tearing paper; the smell of lacquer; or the hollow rustle of the sheet when it settles back into its shape.
Fernando Martín Godoy (Zaragoza, 1975), based in London, develops his work mainly around painting to extend from there to other disciplines such as sculpture, drawing or collage. His work is based on reality -often on found images- and on the history of art itself in order to make a personal reading of the world, in which silence, gaps in information or what happens in the dark areas of memory take centre stage. His pieces often show a pulse between the real and the fictitious. Geometric games, subtlety and synthesis are essential elements in his visual universe.
Winner of the Grand Prix Santa Isabel de Portugal in 2006, his work has been shown in various art galleries and institutional spaces such as the CAB in Burgos, the Espacio Caja Madrid in Zaragoza, the CentroCentro in Madrid, the MACUF in La Coruña, the Centro Guerrero in Granada and the Fondation Suisse in Paris, and at fairs such as ARCO, Art Fair Tokyo, Arte Lisboa, Artesantander and Drawing Room. His works form part of private collections in Spain, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong and the USA, and are present in a good number of Spanish institutional collections.
Vicky Uslé (Santander, 1981) lives and works between New York and Cantabria. Graduated in Fine Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I. in 2003, her work is linked to the pictorial tradition that insists on the poetic potential of abstraction. His works on paper are dominated by dynamism, freedom, fluidity and lightness, combining techniques, formal languages and colour. In this new series called Pontocho, we find images constructed using pastel strokes combined with modular (or architectural) forms resulting from collage. Landscapes that are always subjective, open and unknown, dominated by the peacefulness and balance of a remembrance, which this time directs us to the Japanese city of Kamo and its surroundings.
Some of his works can be seen in the following institutional collections: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo MAS, Santander; Fundación Caja Madrid, Madrid; Fundación Cañada Blanch, Valencia; "Colección Norte", Consejería de Cultura de Cantabria, Cantabria; Colección Navacerrada, Madrid; CAC Málaga, Malaga; Museo de Pamplona, Navarra; Colección Banco Central Europeo, Frankfurt; Colección Los Bragales, Cantabria and Colección Simon de Pury de Phillips, NY.