Press Release

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is delighted to present its second solo exhibition by Barcelona-based artist Jaime Pitarch.

Pitarch's work has included sculpture, drawing, video and performance. Often using humble everyday objects such as a guitar, a chair, and household and consumer products, the artist employs inventive and witty strategies of displacement, recontextualization, and visual punning to peel away at their routine uses and meanings, posing what The Village Voice (writing about his 2006 solo show at the gallery) has called a series of "exquisite conundrums".

This exhibition will feature a suite of new sculptural pieces in which objects are transformed, often with minimal intervention, to explode the habitual and reveal new narrative possibilities.

"The objects I choose as a point of departure to make my work are varied in their nature. I perceive man's gigantic material production as a reflection of an existential anxiety that is always pushing him into successive cycles of invention, re-invention and consumption. On the one hand this has shaped dominant social and economical models but, on the other, these have proved inadequate to maintain spiritual wellness or sanity.

This is why I am interested in mundane objects, because art should have the capacity of relocating them in a spiritual context, and because, if we could manage to reunite all of them in a metaphysical museum, they would draw a phenomenal taxonomy of the absurd. I guess this is why there is always a slight sense of humor and tragedy in many of my works."

The objects one finds in Pitarch's exhibitions are those which have, both sculpturally and conceptually, retained a sense of clarity after having undergone a reflective process. Although the methods he uses are diverse, generally they are reductive, keeping things as simple as possible.

Courtesy of Spencer Brownstone Gallery