The Galería Javier López proudly presents a new solo exhibition by Hannah Collins, a British artist who lives in Barcelona.
Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, in the late seventies Collins won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States, where she came into contact with the sculpture, installations and environments created by minimalist and conceptual artists at that time, which led to her developing a sculptural concept of space linked to memory. Since her very earliest work, she has been concerned with the spatial and temporal elements expressed in architecture, examining the complex physical and psychological relations which, as individuals, we establish with the environment as a way to rebuild our inner vision of reality.
The photographer herself talks of devoting a lot of thought to “the failure of the ‘modern’ and the ways in which the modern has passed into history, whilst at the same time still wielding a powerful influence over the ways we live in the world, the surfaces of the places we occupy and the systems of thought we use to communicate with one another”. The starting point of the photographs titled Clouds was her attempt to make an image that portrays the way in which ideas, with the images inherent in them, give rise to new forms and how the often casual association of concepts or materials can transform these images in a truly poetic way. In Shadow and Clouds, she confronts this vision with a series of images from Brancusi’s studio that speak of the same transformation in relation to the modern.
From this perspective, the artist has been considering many modern buildings, an ongoing project that stretches from the photographs that she took of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion in 2003, where the sense of time seems stuck in an eternal present, up to the new series of images of Brancusi’s studio in Paris, a reconstruction by Renzo Piano that exactly reproduces the relationships between the objects as they were in their original place. In her own words: “It is the morphing of one structure into another, the exact relationship of one thing to another in both its location and three-dimensional abstract space that inspired this set of pictures. I try to settle the picture into its own position as a document of what is and what went before - what an artist was able to do during this active space of the Modern”.
Hannah Collins's work is in numerous public collections, including the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the MACBA in Barcelona and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Highlights of her solo exhibitions include those organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Centre Nationale de la Photographie in Paris, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the CAC in Málaga, the LABoral in Gijón and CaixaForum. Alongside her photographic work, she has made several films (La Cantante (The Singer), 2001; Buscando la Vida (Looking for Life), 2002, La Mina (The Mine), 2003; A Current History, 2006, Parallel and Solitude and Company, 2008), which have been shown at institutions and galleries both in Europe and America (Gering & López Gallery in New York, Centro Cultural de São Paulo), as well as in festivals and mainstream cinemas. She is currently exhibiting La Revelación del Tiempo (The Revelation of Time) at the Art Museum of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá.
