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<\/p>\nMARRIA PRATTS<\/p>\n
Carl Kosty\u00e1l is delighted to present a new body of work by Catalan artist Marria Pratts, her debut at the gallery in London. Ghosts, mice and melting clocks are just some of the familiar tropes in her painterly arsenal that appear in these monumental paintings.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwenty years ago, on a grey November day at the start of the millennium, I stepped into the frosty studio of the celebrated painter Joyce Pensato (1941\u20132019). A legend in the making, Pensato worked in an industrial nave located in an urban wilderness called East Williamsburg, Brooklyn\u2014Bushwick before Starbucks, Hermes and caf\u00e9s crowded with Chads and Brads in gray fleece vests. Known for massive black paintings and drawings of cartoon characters\u2014Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck, Felix the Cat, Batman, the entire Simpson clan and the manic protagonists of \u201cSouth Park\u201d\u2014Pensato, or \u201cFizz,\u201d as her friends called her, held forth on the radical freedom her location gifted her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can do whatever the fuck I want here,\u201d she said while drawing deep on a cigarette. As I mulled the idea over I looked up to see snow falling through a five-foot hole in the ceiling.<\/p>\n
Defiance, autonomy, resilience, invention, the creative negotiation of the world\u2019s light and dark elements in response to one\u2019s immediate surroundings in ways that layer art and move it beyond mere objects and situations\u2026 these are the things that make art turn fructuous, fertile, even feral, whether in Brooklyn, Bern or Barcelona.<\/p>\n
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Marria Pratts LITTLE GHOST 2 [WORK IN PROGRESS & WORKING TITLE], 2024 120h x 80w cm 47.24h x 31.50w in<\/em><\/p>\n All of these factors defined Pensato and her work, but they seem equally attributable to the thirty-five year old Catalan wunderkind Marria Pratts. An intensely generative artist who uses, among other media, paint, sculpture, comics, ceramic, photography, video, music, neon, scavenged materials and whatever is near at hand, Pratts creates discrete artworks that, above all, appear fundamentally energised by their making. A fashioner of drawings, paintings and sculptures and other objects where sheer vitality regularly trumps specific style or technique, she can usually be found hard at work in her studio harnessing multidisciplinary processes of her own invention. These processes she cultivates, develops and refines until they are capable\u00a0of representing what she calls \u201ca reality that is, at once, honest, wild, and very fragile\u201d\u2014but also populated with \u201capparitions\u201d that repeatedly and directly challenge her viewers.<\/p>\n Like Pensato\u2019s now demolished Bushwick studio and Francis Bacon\u2019s disheveled Reese Mews hive in London\u2014it was famously transported across the English Channel, spent smokes and all, to The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin in 1998\u2014Pratts\u2019 well-known working digs provide great insight into her multiple practices and evolving artistic persona. Located on the outskirts of Barcelona in the industrial working class neighbourhood of L\u00b4Hospitalet de Llobregat, her massive live-work space has been redesigned to represent, in the words of one writer, a flourishing view of what goes on inside the artist\u2019s head. A soaring warehouse that contains an island apartment jerry-rigged from bits of wood, polyurethane foam and cardboard recycled from nearby factories\u2014it features a bathtub, a mattress, a wood stove and a literal hole in the wall the artist and others access like a portal\u2014Pratt\u2019s working abode contains a factory\u2019s worth of the multiple projects she constantly juggles, but also recalls a canonical 1960s-era experiment in marrying art and life.<\/p>\n The legendary exhibition\u00a0Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeeman\u2019s for Kunsthalle Bern in 1969, proved to be more than just a mythically influential international survey of Post-minimalism and Arte Povera. It was also a heady primer on how artists and curators could dream up environments of various types with which to actively disappear the borders between events inside and outside their studios. Much like the e\ufb00ervescence overflowing Pratts\u2019 warehouse, Szeeman\u2019s show mobilised multiple spaces for laboratory-like experimentation. Rather than merely foment the \u201cdematerialisation\u201d of the art object or \u201canti-form,\u201d the exhibition proposed a dynamic prerogative for artists: a propagative ideal with which they could, individually and together, respond to a period defined by rapid technological and social change and the collapse of conventional methods of representation. (Epochal similarities anyone?)<\/p>\n In Pratts\u2019 case, assuming the role of artistic dynamo came intuitively\u2014leading her to explore, among other things, various untried approaches to art making. For someone who has lived precariously, she naturally cultivated a sustained interest in the B-side of her city\u2019s urban fabric (\u201cI feel an aesthetic attraction to stu\ufb00 most people ignore,\u201d Pratts says; \u201cI\u2019m inspired as much by walks in my neighbourhood, as I am by flowers growing out of the cement, abandoned tires, paint on asphalt, etc.\u201d). She embraced the possibilities connected to ephemeral gestures performed at a monumental scale (these include loose graphic lines and expressive marks, \u00e0 la Cy Twombly, but also the use of recurrent childlike motifs, like her signature ghost figure which regularly appears as if drawn with a giant Etch-A-Sketch). Lastly\u2014or rather firstly, in terms of strict chronology\u2014she instinctively arrived at a lifetime commitment to painting untroubled by textbook wisdom (i.e., received theoretical justifications), in much the same way children acquire first words and adults simple expressions for challenging ideas.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, conceptual art feels like it is trapped in museums,\u201d Pratts says, distinguishing herself from generations of Spanish artists who eschew two-dimensional work on canvas, \u201cPainting, on the other hand, is invested with magical and radical power.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI very much believe in finding a special space for creation,\u201d Pratts told this writer. \u201cThat\u2019s where I can push my materials to the limit so magical things happen.\u201d Not a few of those spellbinding things have taken centre stage as giant canvases at several major Spanish institutions during the last few years. At the Mir\u00f3 Foundation, for instance, Pratts covered the walls of the museum\u2019s project room with curved sheets of stainless steel that did double duty as both supports for individual sculptures, drawings and XL sized canvases\u2014many sporting her trademark ghosts, clocks and chairs in Goyaesque black and bubblegum pink\u2014and a sweeping framework for her trippy, mirror-like installation. Though pegged as \u201cexpanded painting\u201d by Pere Llobera, the show\u2019s curator\u2014he also suggested the more felicitous phrase \u201cpainting in three dimensions\u201d\u2014Pratts describes her Alice in Wonderland environments more prosaically. At the Miro Foundation, her e\ufb00orts proposed, in her words, an immersive \u201carchitecture, a stainless steel frame with chapels that allows the paintings to float in the space in a unique way.\u201d<\/p>\n If new forms of painting allow viewers a break from the conventional rectangle, then Pratts is on her way to becoming a Benjamin Franklin of 21st\u00a0century painting. Given pride of place at Barcelona\u2019s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) 2022 triennial, the artist contributed a twenty-six foot rectangular canvas across which, to paraphrase Paul Klee in his\u00a0Pedagogical Sketchbook, she deftly took pink, yellow, blue and black lines out for a walk (\u201cAn active line on a walk, moving freely, without a goal,\u201d Klee wrote in his 1925 volume,\u00a0is above all \u201cA walk for a walk\u2019s sake). Additionally, the title of Pratt\u2019s painting\u00a0\u2018Sento una m\u00fasica dintre del cap According to Pratts,\u00a0\u2018Sento una m\u00fasica\u2019\u00a0spent some time kicking around her L\u2019Hospitalet studio before she thought it ready for prime time. It \u201cfermented,\u201d the artist says, using a typically organic metaphor, before being moved to MACBA. Once installed there, she transformed the canvas once more by pushing the limits of what is possible, at least institutionally. Having titled the exhibition\u00a0Apunts per a un incendi dels ulls, or \u201cNotes for Setting Your Eyes On Fire,\u201d MACBA pro\ufb00ered an invitation for Pratts to intervene inside their walls. This the Catalan artist did by activating a signature element of her studio practice\u2014the burning of specific sections of canvases\u2014inside the museum\u2019s galleries. Blowtorch in hand, she alternately exhilarated and terrified curators and sta\ufb00, while returning the elements of surprise and risk to an age-old practice doctrinaire detractors claim as played out, conventional and diminished.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is something ridiculous to begin with about dirtying up a piece of cloth and expecting people to leave their homes to go see it,\u201d the late critic Peter Schjeldahl told legendary curator Robert Storr in 1995. When I relayed this quote to Pratts, she laughed and responded: \u201cI also think there\u2019s something that\u2019s very caveman about the entire exercise. But painting is also the closest I think I will ever get to absolute freedom, to something like founding my own nation state\u2014someplace where I set the rules and change them when I like.\u201d<\/p>\n When I concurred, she delivered herself of a comment worthy of other creative dynamos, but with a generosity that brought me back to Pensato and her unruly defiance, which I now understand to be an expansive embrace: \u201cTo that I would add that painting is also like a ceremony, an age-old one that goes back millennia. For me, at least, it\u2019s like a ceremony where I get to also say \u2018Everybody\u2019s welcome.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Christian Viveros-Faun\u00e9<\/p>\n Brooklyn, 2023.<\/p>\n WEB<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 INSTAGRAM<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 Artsy<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","categories":[50,51],"class_list":["post-40003","insights","type-insights","status-publish","hentry","category-insight","category-stories"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.0","language":"en","enabled_languages":["ko","en"],"languages":{"ko":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights\/40003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insights"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/insights"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n(Transformaci\u00f3 d\u2019un pensament borr\u00f3s)\u2019\u2014English translation: \u201cI feel music inside my head
\n(Transformation of a blurry thought)\u201d\u2014layers additional poetry onto areas electrified by lyrical brushstrokes, spray lines, scribbles, handmade neon bars and burn holes (the artist regularly scarifies her canvases with flame in order to \u201ctransform\u201d what she describes as \u201ca malaise in painting\u201d). Her ultimate purpose: to underscore the near limitless possibilities of painterly freedom but also to represent what she calls \u201ca wound.\u201d \u201cThere is no life without a wound,\u201d she declares shrewdly.<\/p>\nCARL KOSTY\u00c1L LONDON
\n12a Savile Row, London W1S 3PQ<\/h3>\n