Ana Bidart. 2 Bed / 1 Bath, Nice View

About

A fitting counterpoint to Sérgio Sister's exhibition in the main gallery, where Sister extends from the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, Bidart operates in the realm of "Neo-Povera," in which the banal, administrative aspects of domestic life are transformed and reenacted as art.

For this exhibition, Bidart presents a series of new oil paintings that appear to have just arrived, waiting to be hung, or about to depart the room. Here Bidart plays with the idea of an archetypical artist studio through the recreation of gestures and personal artifacts within her own studio. She includes materials such as dust sheets, paint traces, tools, packing material, clothing. Not to be construed as scenography, but rather to connote the feeling of a suspended atmosphere between fiction and reality. 

The title refers, in good humor, to my experience over recent months. I’ve been looking for a new apartment and studio to live and work, which involves copious amounts of paperwork. As a continuation of the Pasaportes series, these new paintings record fragments of contracts, excel sheets, forms and QR codes comprising special systems of grids and patterns, of which are interwoven with organic and playful gestures such as doodles, brushstrokes and fingerprints.
- Ana Bidart