Descripción de la Exposición
Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce their first exhibition of works by Colombian artist Lorena Torres El Milagro es la Pereza de Díos [The Miracle is the Idleness of God], opening at our Maddox Street gallery in September 2024. The exhibition will present eleven new works on canvas made by the artist this year. Torres’ practice is deeply rooted in her upbringing and the culture of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, in this body of work the artist explores notions of the absurd, miracles and the spectacle of performance.
The exhibition takes its title from a quote in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and speaks to a spirituality which Torres locates within the quotidian. Torres revels in the absurdity and beauty of everyday encounters, playfully reflecting a curiosity and astonishment at life’s nuances. In Las maravillas de este mundo (The marvels of this World) a figure creates shadow puppets that dance across an interior wall; in El Secreto (The Secret) a veiled figure stretches across the shoreline surrounded by a congregation of snails. The culture, people and landscape of Torres’ local community on Colombia’s coast are a continued point of departure for the artist’s work. This proximity lends her paintings a fluidity in which figures coalesce with their surroundings, heightened by a palette of earthy colours and warm tones.
In painting, Torres identifies a channel through which to express the joy of life’s experiences but simultaneously a means of observing them. The artist considers herself a spectator of, as well as the creator of, the subjects in her paintings and by extension the shared universal experiences they embody. References to performance and theatricality weave through the paintings in the exhibition from costumed figures, to motifs of a circus tent and a performer juggling knives in front of an audience of horses. Influenced by magical realism, Torres conjures worlds that are at once fantastical and real.
Born in 1991 in Barranquilla, Colombia, Torres received a BFA in Visual Arts from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá in 2016. Her work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, the United States and Colombia, among others. Torres has completed residencies in Bogotá, Miami and most recently at Casa Santa Ana, Panama City.
Exposición. 15 oct de 2024 - 16 feb de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. El 25 oct de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
