Eugenio Ampudia

Eugenio Ampudia - Where to sleep 5 (Palau) 1

Técnica: Photograph. Paper copy, XT Gallery 3mm metacrylate, silicone, neutral pH adhesive, 3mm dibond and indoor aluminum frame

Biografía del Artista: Eugenio Ampudia is a Spanish contemporary artist born in Valladolid in 1958. He studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country and later at the Spanish Academy in Rome. He is known for his work that questions the boundaries of art and life, using a variety of media, from installation to performance and video art. Ampudia has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Spain and around the world, including the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel. He has also been awarded several prizes, including the National Prize for Plastic Arts in Spain. Overall, Eugenio Ampudia's work challenges conventional perceptions of art and reality, opening up new possibilities for interaction and critical reflection. His work has been recognized by critics and the public worldwide, and has left a significant mark on Spanish and international contemporary art.

Eugenio Ampudia (Melgar, Valladolid, 1958) is currently one of the most renowned Spanish artists. His multidisciplinary work received the AECA Award for the best living Spanish artist represented at ARCO18 – which he also won in 2008 – and the ARCO-BEEP Award, Electronic Art Collection. He also received the Delfina Foundation (London) grant in 2008. His work investigates, with a critical attitude, artistic processes, the artist as a manager of ideas, the political role of creators, the meaning of the work of art, the strategies that allow it to be created, its production, promotion and consumption mechanisms, the effectiveness of the spaces assigned to art, as well as the analysis and experience of those who contemplate and interpret them. Her works have been exhibited internationally in places such as ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, Jordan; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston (MA), United States; NCARTE, Bogotá, Colombia; Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines; the Whitechapel in London; the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome; in Biennials such as those in Singapore, Havana, the Biennial of the End of the World or the Biennial of Cuenca. She is part of collections such as MNCARS, MUSAC, ARTIUM, IVAM, La Caixa, among others. Where to Sleep is Ampudia’s most extensive series to date. The artist has been spending the night in various iconic places in culture and art history since 2008. He began the series at the Prado Museum, under Goya’s The Third of May Executions, and later at the Alhambra, the ARCO fair, the Library of the Palacio Nacional da Ajuda in Lisbon, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, ​​and recently at the Diego Rivera Museum of Anahuacalli in Mexico. Throughout the series, the action is based on sleeping in a space dedicated to art, something that has historically been considered illegal and subversive. The simplicity of this gesture underlies Ampudia's position of resistance to certain attitudes in the art world that are have taken for granted and have since become conventional. The act of sleeping has taken on different nuances since the political upheaval of recent years and the emergence of movements such as the 15M, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Museums, etc., and it has become an act of resistance in itself and a declaration of intent. On the other hand, the gesture of doing it in a public space has always been associated with the marginal, as well as with situations of transit in some “non-place” –on a long trip or a plane stopover– or of helplessness, all of them metaphors that adapt quite well to the moment in which art and culture have found themselves in our country since the artist began the series. But the positive attitude of Ampudia's works brings us closer to his connection with the act of dreaming, of producing ideas, of rethinking and continuing to dream of utopia, that which sustains us and before which we must adopt a political position. Throughout the history of art, the act of sleeping has been presented as a subversive and elemental gesture when analyzing our role as individuals within the construction of social space: from the sculptures of sleeping Eros that decorated Roman villas in the Hellenistic era to The Sleep of Reason produces Goya's monsters –so well interpreted later by the British Yinka Shonibare–, Henry Fuseli's Nightmare, the Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate One Second Before Waking Up by Salvador Dalí or other works by his fellow surrealists, to mention a few representative examples. Other somewhat more contemporary historiographic examples with Morpheus as the protagonist would be the famous film Sleep, Andy Warhol's first, where the actor John Giorno sleeps soundly for more than five hours; or The Maybe by Cornelia Parker, where Tilda Swinton She slept eight hours a day in a display case at the Serpentine Gallery, just as the Israeli artist couple Gil and Moti slept in their New York gallery in search of a new lover through their work Sleeping with the Enemy. Sophie Calle, in Les dormeurs, starts by inviting different people, mostly strangers, to sleep in her own bed and then photographing them. Even some institutions have offered to serve as hotels, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which a few years ago years, starting with the work Revolving Hotel Room by the Belgian artist Carsten Ho¨ller and because of the “modest” holidays), visitors were allowed to spend a night inside the museum. Or to go to closer cases, the ARTIUM in Vitoria, which, in an initiative by the artistic group Fundación Rodríguez, proposed a night of collective sleep as one of the actions to reinterpret the museum's collection. As A more recent example is that of Chinese artist Zhou Jie, who in her exhibition at the Beijing Art Now Gallery entitled 36 days, lived in that space for the duration indicated by the title of the project. She slept on a wire bed, sometimes accompanied by her partner. Although all these examples can inevitably be associated with a certain patina of fetishism, a certain morbidness for sleeping in the institutional space –that which would correspond to what is correct and normative–, they are rather a profound reflection on the nature of the dreams and the way in which these are projected onto the individual, a line that is continued by Ampudia to reflect, once again, on the codes and structures of contemporary art, as well as on the critical situation in which it finds itself. He also intends, with this act, to get rid of the artist self to show himself as a more immediate self, and in turn to transform the art space into a much closer place, an art space close to everyone that makes us feel at home. Thus, a reformulation of our concept of living is proposed that, through the reiteration of the action in various iconic places, convinces the spectator that their relationship with these places should be relaxed and felt as their own. Once again it reminds us to make ourselves comfortable, that public space belongs to everyone and is for everyone, and that this relaxed attitude towards the temples of art is one more way of rewriting history, or at least of opening new chapters… White Tower