Next Thursday, September 14, Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend 2017 is celebrated, during which 46 galleries open very interesting exhibitions at the same time, turning the capital into the center of contemporary art. From September 14 to 16, in parallel and in collaboration with museums and art centers such as the Reina Sofía, the Thyssen Museum, the Mapfre Foundation, among others, special joint activities will be carried out.

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“IMAGINARY BEINGS”, OSCAR SECO.

From September 14 to October 21, 2017.

 

In this exhibition you can see two main blocks:

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1.-  The series in which the inert bodies of oversized birds appropriated from the characteristic still lifes of the Baroque and the landscapes and bucolic scenes of eighteenth-century Dutch painting merge. Both the still life and the landscape have always been very reviled pictorial genres throughout the history of art and with the appropriation of them to create new work, what the artist tries is to magnify them in some way. This idea was also treated by the artist in his series "Caídos del Cielo" (2009-2015) in which the same giant birds appear on the ground in different modern warfare scenes  after having been launched like missiles.

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These works also drink from several literary classics such as Herbert George Wells and his science fiction novel: "The food of the gods" in which two British scientists manage to create a food that causes excessive growth in people, animals and plants . The novel "Fatal Eggs" by the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov,  set in Moscow in 1928 is another clear example of this. In the book, Professor Pérsikov,  discovers a ray that accelerates growth that is later used by the state to raise chickens, as an epidemic wiped out all the poultry farming in the country. Unfortunately, a chain of errors leads to tragedy.

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In summary, they are works loaded with content and nods to the black cinema of the 50s, literature and comics, in addition to having a playful aspect and a surreal touch, they give off irony from every pore.

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2.- The series of unpublished drawings by Oscar Seco that are presented for Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend 2017, is also built from the Appropriation of different elements that the artist decontextualizes and merges with each other to create a new reality.

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The drawings, which recreate the aesthetics of old engravings, combine 18th-century Dutch landscapes, animals taken from 17th-century bestiaries, and fantastic beings from "The Book of Imaginary Beings" by Jorge Luis Borges. Bestiaries are compendiums of beasts that became very popular during the Middle Ages in the form of illustrated volumes describing animals, plants, and organic elements. The naturalists that inspired Oscar Seco are the Jesuit priest Atanasio Kircher  (1602-1680) and the Swiss naturalist Konrad Gessner with his book "Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts", whose sketches we They are very reminiscent of Dürer's famous rhinoceros, a clear example of the imaginary that existed at the time about the most exotic animal species. Referring to "The Book of Imaginary Beings", Borges makes a compilation of strange beings that arise from human invention in different mythologies, cultures and times.

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Model: Oscar Seco created this model in 2014, it is also an unpublished work and it is designed as another fantastic scene in which a submarine, which is actually a giant squid, arrives at a Nazi military base. Much of the elements were created and painted by hand by the artist.