01_Idoia Montón_El rapto de las Sabinas I, 2015.jpg [1]

01_Idoia Montón_La Tregua o Las lanzas, 2017.jpg [2]

03_Idoia Montón_ST, 1997.jpg [3]

04_Idoia Montón_Las siete ventanas de mi habitación, 2005.jpg [4]

05_Idoia Montón_Minas de Arditurri IV, 2006.jpg [5]

06_Idoia Montón_Anunciación en Virgen del Carmen 6, 2012.jpg [6]

IDOIA MONTÓN.The Seven Windows

The exhibition brings together numerous works by Idoia Montón (Donostia, Basque Country, 1969) from 1990 to the present day: paintings, drawings and collages from private and public collections, such as the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and the Artium, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art.

Idoia_600x200.jpg [7]

Idoia_200x150.jpg [8]

01_Idoia Montón_El rapto de las Sabinas I, 2015.jpg [1]

01_Idoia Montón_La Tregua o Las lanzas, 2017.jpg [2]

03_Idoia Montón_ST, 1997.jpg [3]

04_Idoia Montón_Las siete ventanas de mi habitación, 2005.jpg [4]

05_Idoia Montón_Minas de Arditurri IV, 2006.jpg [5]

06_Idoia Montón_Anunciación en Virgen del Carmen 6, 2012.jpg [6]

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Dates:

13 May 2022 - 4 September 2022

Place:

1st floor B1 Gallery and Side Gallery

Hours:

Tuesday to Saturday (inc. holidays) from 11am to 2:30pm and from 5pm to 9pm. Sunday from 11am to 2:30pm

Production:

Sala Rekalde (Bilbao, Diputación Foral de Bizkaia) / MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo

Curated by: Alicia Fernández and Miguel Fernández-Cid

With the collaboration of: Deputación de Pontevedra

On the 13^th of May, Vigo welcomes Las siete ventanas, the fruit of a collaboration between the MARCO and Sala Rekalde, (Bilbao, Diputación Foral de Bizkaia, Basque Country), that seeks to promote travelling, coproduced exhibitions. The exhibition brings together numerous works by Idoia Montón (Donostia, Basque Country, 1969) from 1990 to the present day: paintings, drawings and collages from private and public collections, such as the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and the Museum San Telmo, Donostia.

The title “seven windows” aims to convey, both literally and metaphorically, the different ways to conjugate the inside and the outside, the frame and the threshold or the street and the room. Her use of windows is a recurring element present throughout her entire career as a means to see reality, scenery or life. In this manner, the importance of the point of view, of a gaze that is never standard, direct or centred, but lateral, multiple and fragmented, is highlighted. Mirrors and reflected images play a similar enduring role.

The oeuvre produced by Idoia Montón over the last three decades, while living between the Basque Country and Catalonia, is strongly coherent, thanks to its radical heterogeneity. Montón perceives painting as an open and sovereign process, that is sensitive to serendipity and chance, where the only constant is the organizational notion of form or structure.

The aim of this undertaking is to review the career of the artist and present the milestones that structure her work. However, the goal is not to offer a retrospective exhibition arranged chronologically, but to display a series of thematic, formal and contextual lines. According to this arangement, the exhibition is organised in four areas: Una habitación propia, Guerra, Barna, and Con los ojos abiertos.

Idoia Montón initiates her pursuit of the meaning of painting in familiar surroundings, and from there she explores reality and the world we inhabit. Her paintings and drawings are built from a catalogue of everyday images.

Rooted in freedom, rigour and self-criticism, as a way of expressing herself in her own voice, she shapes her artwork in the manner of a tale. Taking literature, fables and metaphors or fictional settings as her starting point, she counterposes concepts of the particular and the general by using expressive means that enhance the message. Idoia Montón’s work begins in the studio as playing with shapes and materials that, at a certain moment, starts to crystallize and becomes a piece of art. The studio is a laboratory where numerous experiments can be performed on a medium as highly charged, in historical terms, as painting so that it may speak to us in the present tense again. “I want my paintings to be a mirror in which the public can see themselves. It is about entering and finding their lives reflected”.

In the studio, elements are organized according to a layout that the artist has called “enigmatic” and that c

Documentary dossier

Parallel to the exhibition, MARCO's Library-Centre of Documentation has prepared a documentary dossier, which includes links to articles and complementary information about the artist, accessible from MARCO's website www.marcovigo.com [9] in the sections Library/News and Exhibitions/Present.

Weekend workshops for children

In collaboration with: Obra Social “la Caixa”

Opening hours: Saturdays from 11am to 12.30pm (from 3 to 6 years old) and from 12.30pm to 2pm (from 7 to 12 years old)

Registrations required: tel. +34 986 113900 Ext. 100 / +34 986 113908 / E-mail recepcion.marco@gmail.com [10]

Information and guided tours

The exhibition staff is available for any queries or information regarding the exhibition, in addition to the usual guided tours:

Every day at 18.00
Visits on demand for groups, by appointment on tel. +34 986 113900 / +34 986 113908

Interactive routes via Vigo App

The new system of interactive routes via Vigo App allows visitors to access all kinds of content about the exhibition (videos, images, specific information about the works), either in the space itself through the beacons or bluetooth devices located in the rooms, or anywhere else, following the route on your phone’s screen after downloading and installing the application, or on your computer through the website of the Concello de Vigo.

Download:

PR_IDOIA MONTÓN_Eng.pdf [11]

Contact Sheet_captions_IDOIA MONTÓN_eng.pdf [12]

IM Lista obras_corresp plano_OK corregida.pdf [13]

Plano numerado Idoia Montón.pdf [14]

Summary

TOUR THROUGH THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition adheres to a very loose chronological order tinged with anachronistic associations. It is organised in four areas: Una habitación propia, Guerra, Barna and Con los ojos abiertos.

Una habitación propia [A Room of One’s Own] includes Montón’s first sculptural experiments as well as several of her cut-out papers – works she executed in the Basque Country before leaving for Barcelona. This output is characterised by a highly unusual idea of space and by the tensions that paradoxically emerge from the strictest flatness. In addition, the works reflect a certain narrative or allegorical content that, although diluted and nuanced, will not disappear. A group of new paintings broaching the artist´s day-to-day experience can be found here. It breathes new life into the term “realism”, including views of the places she lives in, still lifes composed of the objects around her and portraits of people close to her. Indeed, it is a kind of realism that has been passed through the sieve of memory and imagination, hence the unsettling presences that interrupt the scenes. Likewise, the classical tropes of the studio self-portrait and the painting-within-a-painting also stand out from the onset.

The exhibition continues with Guerra [War], a cycle of works that highlights Montón’s concern about the representation of power and violence utilizing a historical revision of painting and a new approach to collage. It is a heterogeneous series of works that incorporates all kinds of materials on the pictorial support: from photographs to palettes, clothing to ceramics, but also includes unique compositions such as Púber (2015), made exclusively from objects found by her. The “Guerra” of the title refers to the long war of Syria as well to the violence that capital exerts on bodies and on the world throughout history.

In Barna [Barcelona], we come across constant references to a specific artistic and social context with two issues that stand out: on the one hand, there is the artist's response to the denial or suspicion of painting's contemporaneity and on the other hand her reflections on the long crisis in which the city where she resides is embroiled. Another group of works is spotlighted here due to its concisiveness and its silence. These works offer a fragmented vision of things, in which she veils the image to the point of making it almost unrecognisable.

Con los ojos abiertos [With Open Eyes] closes the exhibition and brings together two different bodies of work. On one side, there is a series of biomorphic, almost monstrous cities, where planes and directions are blended. In the same way, the boundaries between the living and the dead, the animal and the mechanical, the real and the hallucinatory are blurred. Tentacular machines that not only reveal a terrifying vision of public space but also paradigmatically bring together three central motifs in the artist's work: the city, the animal and the night.

Finally, this fourth area includes a series begun in 2019 during a residency in Iraqi Kurdistan organised by Moving Artists.

Sacrifice or offering connects the region's masterpieces, such as the first Kurdish temples or the Wounded Lioness, with everyday decorative elements, such as plastics and ornate textiles, to flesh out an idea as paradoxical as it is radical: society is not held together by its productive and functional activities, but by what makes it tremble with excitement, such as festivals or games, which involve a wild display of enthusiasm.

“My work is fuelled by my bond to the spaces I inhabit, in which I manoeuvre. I use my direct relationship with things that could be regarded as the simplest of our daily lives to delve into myself by questioning my circumstances and events. My work exteriorizes my feelings and tries to act, with its transformative power, upon reality”

Idoia Montón

Artists

Idoia Montón [15]

Artist's text

The enigmatic scope
Idoia Montón

“My work is nurtured by my bond with the spaces I inhabit, in which I develop myself. Using my direct relationship with things, probably those understood as the most common of the ordinary life, I explore my inner self questioning the circumstances and events that involve me. My work exteriorises my feelings and intends, by means of its transformative power, to change reality.

When I first start to materialise any idea in my studio, I usually use the collage, since it favours an immediate approach and a dynamic action that I try to control with an open mind. Materials and textures turn it into a source of expressiveness on the surface that helps in shape work. All those diverse and unequal elements I display end up conforming an enigmatic space that claims for solutions. It is in its manipulation, as I insert the ideas I want to define and convey or that simply come up, when I regard its combination and consistency. In this process, its dimensions and meaning are progressively defined.

If I finally decide to transfer a sketch to the canvas, in this expressive action, there is always something missing, a gap, that demands new motives and contents. Sometimes I reinterpret the layers of the reality I see through photography or some sections, after retrieving them from the history of art. The role of those is to play as intensity boosters, to be opposite elements that collide or even obstinately demand the possibility of an unlikely meeting. All those aspects push me to make decisions at the time of creating, to internalize all its components and to try to give them a meaning on the canvas. Then, the painting expresses itself as an open space, subjugated to a process in which any shape can finally be exposed. It could be a war emergency, a kind of phantasmagoria, in the uncertain place under perpetual renovation in a western capital… Perhaps they are unexpected manifestations of supposedly organic appearance that claim for a materialization that once seemed unthinkable. The conclusion is that it is the process itself which takes over the reins, for it is the origin of the spark, the illumination, an unexpected meaning or an expressive discovery. It is only once that path is explored, if the creation no longer demands changes, when the revealed elements are given a meaning that is only enclosed when it comes to its context. Certainly, chance plays an important role.

Every finished work, deliberately organic, is also the evidence of a moment, its creative process and a stock of the ideas, meetings and experiences that enlightened it. A fixed expression that reveals itself as an open space before the eyes of the beholder”.