Elena Bajo | An Abitrary Issue

García Galería is proud to present the first exhibition of Elena Bajo (Madrid, 1976) in Spain. Her art practice focuses on the production of the work itself, and on the workspace or exhibition space as laboratory. Her oeuvre expands into painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. She mainly employs or builds with materials she finds in her everyday, personal environment, as well as in the workplaces she is connected to: her own studio, the exhibition spaces where she exhibits her work, or art schools.

She defines the work in this show as “going beyond the ready-made (Duchamp) or chance (Cage), closer to poetry and speculation than to fixed statements, understanding art production as a social space”.

The origin of these paintings can be found in framing workshops: the paper presented is the one that the framer uses to work on; it has marks and traces of paint, cuts and scratches made by glass. The new work appears to be organised by chance, a result of the culmination of the conclusion of earlier works, the archaeological record of work itself.
The reintroduction of the concept of the ready-made allows us to break the object down into its economic, labour, or social components. The paint residues are like an archive of time through gesture, and of form through brushstrokes. These works investigate the different rhythm established between the mechanical production of the object and that of the craftsman working with his hands. This leads us to question the concept of the image, what we expect to find within it, and notions of authorship and premeditation.

Regarding the sculpture (which is also made up of discarded objects and material), Bajo rearranges these found elements into compositions of juxtaposed forms that create new levels of meaning. The work draws attention to its own creative process as an “order of anarchy” that the artist defines as anarco-sculpture. From this point onward, she develops a code that feeds on well-known historical references, as well as on new proposals that revolve around ambiguity and chance.

Elena Bajo studied at Central St Martins School of Art in London, and holds an MA in Architecture from the ESARQ, in Barcelona. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.

From February 1st until March 20th of 2014