'Globed'
CIBRIÁN is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of José Ramón Amondarain's gallery. He has been a prominent artist on the Spanish art scene for decades and belongs to a generation that marks a milestone in the history of art in the second half of the 20th century. It is important to look back to understand the impact that this generation has had, especially on painting.
This turning point probably began in the early 1980s with appropriationism, a movement underappreciated in view of the recent history of painting. Take, for example, the work of Sherrie Levine, who at that time began reproducing modernist paintings on a reduced scale in watercolors. This gesture literally showed us the different states of the image through the painting, questioning of course the idea of the author. Levine’s watercolors are all at once: copies, recreations, watercolors, and originals. All of these states are encapsulated in the painting. We are faced with a transfer that turns content into image and image into information. This change in the reading of the painting puts the subject on the same level as the rest of the pictorial components. Davil Joselit articulated this change when he wrote: “(…) the abstract gesture now marks the transfer of information rather than the production of new information itself, which was the territory claimed by abstract expressionism.”