Past - MONDO GALERIA

BY THE RIVER OF KINGS

Jacob Aue Sobol

From 17th FEBRUARY to 30th MARCH 2018

OPENING Saturday 17th February 20hs

"The Chao Phraya River is the lifeblood of Thailand. It is born as the Ping and Nan rivers become one. From there its waters flow south to Bangkok. These pictures are a recording of what I saw and the people I met along The River of Kings in Bangkok." J.A.S

MONDO GALERIA presents for the first time in Spain "BY THE RIVER OF KINGS" an exhibition of the Danish photographer member of the MAGNUM PHOTOS agency: Jacob Aue Sobol (Copenhagen, 1976). This work compiled in a book of the same name presents “the” city of Bangkok found by the photographer. Its streets, its people, its lights sifted by the black and white contrast so particular of Sobol´s work. His approach to people is very special, his search for beauty in unique compositions that poke around in between the grotesque and the unbridled at times and between the perverse and the childish others, but always in the search for love.

The author will be present on the opening to sign books and a portfolio review will be organized for photographers who like to Exchange with the photographer.

“By the river of Kings”. 2016. Jacob Aue Sobol.

Bangkok, Nueva York, Singapur, Madrid ...

Black and White photography has challenged the world of truth; it has defined a parallel reality beyond comprehension. We have absorbed information coming from a medium presumed to be close to real life but certainly seriously far from it, much closer to a hallucinatory realm. When have our dreams or imagination been deprived of color? When have our collective unconscious been on black and white?
Photography has been from its beginning, somewhere in the middle of 19th century, a tool to help socioeconomic development to grow on a controlled direction, taking us to what we understand today as “common… ordinary”.
“Ordinary” or “common” did not exist before we could print a presence or personality on film or paper. (not even think of image in motion). Everybody was, as a matter of being, not focused on the looks of others; of “The other”.

Nowadays we concentrate on an individuality pushed and pampered by fashion, image and aesthetics, leaving aside humanity, sensibility and love. There is where evolution from personal disappearance has brought us, pressed by technocracy and scientology (not religiously). Religion is far from it, its abandon, left behind. No rules of control or order, just business. As always has been but in a macro way (wave. Tsunami). An endless desperation for selling what nobody wants. An invented market empty of goods, empty of content.

We travel far, and we do not see the human. We travel far trying to find a difference to pumper us, that makes us feel comfortable on our shit. That creates an “Other” where it’s just light; silver and paper. Humanity is there, on the streets that are different from our streets but deeply inside are the same ones. On rivers that carry an energy that its somewhere in our veins but we don’t want to see it. In an order, that because it seems different to ours, makes us feel it as distant, but it’s really there, just next to our day by day things on the deep core of family life. Can we change that? Can we move from our convention and accept a different stream, a different source, a different river?

That’s the challenge, the purpose, the quest that we face on this work. A vision, of a world that is there, waiting for us to accept it and to acknowledge it as a part of our life.

“By the river of Kings”. 2016. Jacob Aue Sobol.

FLORES PARA MI FUNERAL

Casimiro Martinferre

Desde el 30 de Septiembre / From September 30th 2017

INAUGURACIÓN Sábado 30 de Septiembre 12hs / Opening September 30th - 12hs

“Flores para mi Funeral”. Piezas únicas en gelatina de plata de Casimiro Martinferre quien fue accésit en el 1º PREMIO INTERNACIONAL DE FOTOGRAFÍA MONDO GALERIA y que ahora forma parte de nuestros artistas representados. Pide un catálogo para poder reservar las obras antes de la exposición ya que se nos van de las manos.
Travesía de Belén 2. Madrid – 28004

“Flowers for my Funeral”, unique pieces on silver gelatin by Casimiro Martinferre who has been a runner up at the 1º INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY PRICE MONDO GALERIA and now he is part of our represented artists. Ask for a catalogue to book this unique works before they fly away from our hands.
30th September 2017. Travesía de Belén 2. Madrid – 28004

“Flores para mi funeral”. 2017. Casimiro Martinferre.

SOBRE LA OBRA

Hablar de fotografía es hablar de palabras, de sentidos, de inspiración. Una luz y el negro. Una oscuridad, el negativo.

Al pensar en la obra de Casimiro Martinferre pienso inmediatamente en Baudelaire, Charles. Aquel mitológico hito de Historia. Aquella llama nocturna soplada a fuelle de gaita. A vientos tempestuosos que nos traen el mar, nuestra poca cordura y el comienzo arcaico de una modernidad que hoy acaba.

Pues sí. Llegamos al fin sin saber qué hacer con nuestro desperdicio, con la codicia que flota en un Manifiesto delicado y tenue en busca de luz. Aquella que perdimos.

Gelatinas de plata que tuercen las palabras en un arcabuz emocional del que no estamos a salvo, ni queremos. Estamos aquí, ahora, en el momento exacto que nos corresponde. El momento de comenzar a ver que estamos muriendo y que eso es lo más valioso de nuestro tiempo, lo que nos hace brillar. Dilucidar un futuro creado por el empuje de una herencia descontrolada de pasado.

¿Y ahora? Me pregunto atónito. Ahora… es el momento de abrir este libro, de seguir sus palabras, de descubrir imágenes que hablan tanto de un planeta sucio de nosotros mismos como de un alma ardiente despojada de coraza.

Diego Alonso

MUSICAL PORTRAITS

Deborah Feingold

From 30th NOVEMBER 2017 to 30th JANUARY 2018

OPENING thursday 30th November - 20hs

“It was very free-form, and I´d never been happier. Being around jazz musicians, I learned how to improvise. That changed my life. It was risk-taking and it was exciting.” DF

MONDO GALERIA presents for the first time in Spain a solo exhibition by Deborah Feingold, an American photographer pioneer of adding musicality to portraiture. Always close to the music scene, each one of her images has a careful construction based on rhythm and melody overturned to color, which has managed to tame beasts of the likes of Keith Richards or Tom Wolfe, as well as create intimate dialogues with less hedonistic characters such as Brian Eno or Sinead O'Connor. Her indisputable career makes it today, with time, one of the most important portraitists of pop culture since the end of the 70s.

“David Byrne”. 1983. ©Deborah Feingold.

20 of the best portraits by Deborah Feingold make this exhibition an unmatchable tour through the last decades of a century (XXth) when popular culture was invented and that musicians were turned into great visual aspirations beyond their musical talents.

“Sinead O´Connor” 1990. ©Deborah Feingold

The musicality on the portrait

Musicality is related to the beautiful, the aesthetic and the tangible of music, but it also refers to what is born inside, which is inherent to the musical person. Almost all good musicians, if we observe, carry that musicality in their person. Their posture, their way of walking, the expressions or the space they fill in. That musicality is what Deborah Feingold captures with her camera.

Although aware of the presence of the camera, the portrayed one appears playing, creating, negotiating his image with the photographer. Although the compositions are sometimes complex, naturalness is what always prevails, strangely, within these moments built to the millimeter. There is whaere we can see her experience, a photographer who knows how to prepare her canvas so that at the moment of shooting it is the improvisation that prevails, the ease, the fluidity of the moment and the encounter. And in this she behaves totally like a Jazz musician. Miles Davis (with whom Deborah had the opportunity to coincide) does not improvise on an empty open field, the king of the bebop, like his friend Coltrane or many others, improvise on a specific melody, once absorbed and assimilated. When they dominate it, is when they can put it together and disarm it innumerable times, undo it, dissect it and always return to it as if nothing had happened.
In the image exists a time factor that is irreversible, but that is what ends up creating a good photograph. That: it could not be half a second before or a half after. There is an exact moment that makes the photograph and that moment in the portrait is a moment of confluence between the photographer and the photographed, a supreme moment that is engraved on the plate and it is the result of all the ingredients that were carefully prepared for that image, added to the improvisation of the moment and united by an amalgam of time and magic that is the only thing that create an image as these are. Then, analysis will come with the years, the time, who have become the portrayed or if an image has become an icon or not, but, the important thing, the essential, was there dormant from the exact moment it was shot.

“Brian Eno” 1981. ©Deborah Feingold

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Deborah Feingold
(Rhode Island, 1951)

One of photographer Deborah Feingold's earliest darkrooms was actually a prison cell. After graduating from Emerson College in the early 1970's, she was awarded a grant to teach photography to troubled youth in a Boston prison, affirming her belief in the power of the camera as a tool for self-expression and communication and laying the groundwork for a decades-long career photographing the most prominent names in American culture.

Feingold moved to New York City in 1976, where her relationship with a jazz musician inspired her to embrace a spirit of improvisation in her photography and led to her first major assignment: shooting jazz icon Chet Baker for the Artist House record label. Her work with Baker and others on the label caught the attention of Musician magazine, who hired Feingold as their New York liaison.
Turning her small apartment into a makeshift studio (this time her shower stall served as the dark room) and freewheeling it on the unpredictable streets of New York, Feingold captured indelible images of some of the most legendary names in music, from B.B. King and James Brown to Bono and Madonna to REM and Pharrell.

Feingold's unique ability to put her subjects almost immediately at ease engendered the kind of rare moments of honesty and intimacy that became the hallmark of her work, and over the ensuing decades, her photographs would appear in Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek and The New York Times among others, along with countless album and book covers. The portraits in her catalog read like a who's who of cultural icons: President Barack Obama, Mick Jagger, Bill Gates, Tom Wolfe, Prince, Johnny Depp, George Carlin, and many more.

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Alia Ali

“Borderland"

Exhibition of photographs / from 23 March to 22 April 2017

Opening THURSDAY 23 March 2017 - 20hs

“Being covered can be interpreted as a state of confinement, but in fact, one can be confined whether or not they are veiled or not.”.

A.A

MONDO GALERIA presents for the first time in Spain the latest works by multimedia artist Alia Ali. “Borderland” continues with her photographic investigation about the textile processes from around the globe. With this series she continues exploring the boundaries within dualistic relationships. Her work takes her around the world searching for those fabric patterns in extinction and their evolution in time, traditions and cultures from villages, cities or empires.

As guest artist for this exhibition, Madrid based designer Lidia Muro creates a site-specific installation in MONDO GALERIA working with textiles collected by her from around the world.

Casual, or causally both artists have been at different times in the same places. For very different reasons, but with the same passion for fabrics, thus a very sharp dialogue has been created over the two works.

BORDERLAND is a series of portraits that questions the barriers which divide and unite us, all at once. The characters in her portraits, called “-cludes”, are enveloped in layers of fabric from eleven different regions of the world. The fabric as a borderland becomes a territory of exploration where the mysterious becomes apparent, restraint becomes freedom, and illusion becomes reality.

The sensation gathered from these magical images created by Alia Ali is strange as in The Tempest by Greenaway. On one side they absorb us as a mirror, while on the other they transmute us to political thinking, to this incomprehensiveness where we are submerged, even if just by pluralities weight.

It is not easy to face an image which departing from a flat element and jetted in the form of pigment on to another flat element – specifically cotton paper – can gather such an inward strength to propagate at thinking level both, towards the interior of it as to the entire world surrounded, getting us trapped on a roller coaster of ideas circulating through the most opened channels of universal energy. Far beyond the earthly world, in orbit.

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