ART COLOGNE 2023

For the COLLABORATIONS sector of Art Cologne 2023, we propose a duo presentation featuring recent work by two artists in dialogue: Maurice Meewisse, based in Rotterdam, and Antonio Fernández Alvira, based in Madrid. The interconnection of body, space, politics, and history becomes evident in the way both artists stage their work, piece by piece and as an installation. Their individual works are more autobiographical explorations, linking the artists’ pasts to stories they have encountered. Both artists primarily work in specific contexts, in which they understand the “site” as part of a complex network of interests, projections, and relationships.

By immersing themselves in the (re)discovery of a space mainly through intuition, they conceive space as a container of disconnected and tacit histories hidden deep within the structure of objects. Within these, they seek discrepancy, a certain complexity, or a potential concealed beneath the surface.

In the case of Maurice Meewisse, reclaimed wood is the predominant material throughout the presentation because, in the artist’s view, it is alive, transformative, and carries its own history. The presentation will include a selection of works from the immersive installation Isolators, which originally consisted of 47 pieces of various sizes, made from different types of wood, from different timelines, with countless stories to tell, and sourced from across the Netherlands. Maurice Meewisse uses arboreal structure not only as a primary source for his sculptures but also as a means to express overlapping personal, political, social, and historical narratives. Through this exercise of extreme contextual concentration, Meewisse creates objects related to space, in which it is experienced more through time and history than through geometric or empirical means.

For Antonio Fernández Alvira, the starting point of Memory of Form is the reading or interpretation of the site and architecture for which this project was conceived: Alhóndiga de Bilbao (originally built to store various food products, especially wine and oil), understood as a container of containers. The inherent qualities of fluids—their lack of form, their flow, and their ability to “imitate” the shape of the vessel that contains them—inspired Alvira to create a laboratory based on the concept of the absence of memory of form and flow. Within this framework, he explores and narrates the relationships body–structure–vessel and fluid–content, using dialogue and analysis with the architectural forms and elements for which the space was conceived. The resulting work is based on vessels traditionally used to contain and transport fluids, such as amphorae, vases, jugs, cups, bowls, etc. Their forms and materials have been studied through processes of decomposition and fragmentation, working with these vessels in their fresh production alongside a potter—the last in a long lineage of potters from a small village in the province of Huesca, the region from which Antonio Alvira’s family originates.

Both Meewisse’s and Alvira’s installations point toward the creation of space within space, so to speak. They are not only concerned with the placement of individual artworks but, more importantly, with the alteration of context, treating space as a symbolic medium that enables new relationships and new imaginaries.