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Prósper I
Date: 2001
Technique: Black and white photograph on aluminium
Dimensions: 180 x 125 cm
Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma. Donation of the artist
Reg. no.: 469
Not on display
The photograph Prósper I (2001) belongs to a series devoted to several characters who openly exhibit their feelings before the camera. The protagonists’ lifestyles have little in common although they do have a certain connectivity in terms of things emotional and a similar attitude to life. This is the case of Prósper, a young Nigerian immigrant who was forced to flee his country in order to preserve his right to life. A closeup of his face, portrayed behind a wire fence, clearly representing the deprivation of freedom, reveals hope through an opening in the fence, a symbol of the walk to freedom.
E.B.
Francesca Martí lives and works in Mallorca. A multidisciplinary artist, she studied at the Escola Lliure de Mediterrani in Palma from 1985 to 1989 under Joaquim Torrens Lladó. Her career began in the late 1980s, but it was in the following decade that she became known on the Mallorcan artistic scene through painting, photography and installations. From 2002 on, Francesca Martí adopted the language of video which she combines with large painted, perforated canvases in her installations. Her work unifies different artistic methods and other disciplines, too, including music and dance. Although at first she resorted to elements such as fire and insects, it is the human figure which is constantly present, above all in her more recent work. A human figure that demands a more or less evident freedom of form, whose skin is often painted before being photographed or filmed; on other occasions, the artist intervenes directly in the photographs by applying paint, in an attempt to break down barriers between photography and things gestural, through action painting. In her installations, she uses video projections of human faces and bodies which emerge from needles, executed on large monochrome canvases, distorted figures whose purpose is that of confusing the spectator with regard to what is real and what is imagined, a portrait with classical iconography transformed into a dynamic image. Works that allude to the struggle for freedom from fears and emotion, from sensuality, from racism or from sex, through mythology, entomology, the human portrait, etc. The artist herself classifies her works into six broad projects: “The fly”, “Senses and movements”, “Soul”, “Tears”, “Scream”, “Momentum”. She has held individual exhibitions at the Casal Solleric (Palma de Mallorca, 1995), Bruton Street Gallery (London, 1998), Paule De Boeck Fine Arts, Gent (Belgium, 1999), Galeria Altair (Palma de Mallorca, 1995, 2000, 2006), Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca (2002), Apothiki Art Centre in Paros (Greece, 2006), The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery (Tel Aviv, 2007), Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (Amman, 2007), Real Academia de España en Roma (2008) and Villa Pisani (Venecia, 2008), Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma (2008), PYO Gallery (Beijing, 2009). In 2007, her exhibition “Soul”, presented in the Spanish pavilion of the X Cairo Biennale, won first prize. Her work is present in public and private collections such as Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Col·lecció Testimoni, “la Caixa” (Barcelona), Banca March (Palma de Mallorca), Col·lecció Serra (Mallorca) and BBL Collection (Belgium). E.B.