PRESS RELEASE

Julia Mariscal: To chew missing parts or temporal modes

02 May 2008 – 23 May 2008

Grand Palais is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of this young artist. Featuring a variety of cross media works from the last year.

Julia Mariscal (1981) searches for specific images and words to create unanticipated meaning, shifting their context, size or material to turn them into something either funny or disturbing. There is always a subtle transformation going on, testing the viewer’s perception. Her seemingly ephemeral and playful interventions give her objects and drawings a subversive quality. Are they the aesthetic celebration of ruins and debris, of unrestrained commercialization and decay?

She highlights the amorphous properties of the material, elevating discarded leftovers to the status of art objects with a display that fights against grandiloquence. The exhibition is a collage of ideas, of heterogeneous rhythms through the space, not only in its actual appearance, but also in ‘purpose’, making the viewer conscious of their fragility on the surroundings. They are scattered fragments that provide the imaginary space for the viewer to dream up the rest.

She plays with the traditional ideas of magic and illusion that religion generates, relating them to the contemporary object. Ex-votos are offerings left on the church in order to thank a healing miracle to god. They are normally shaped in parts of the body that represent the misfortune from which they have recovered. Julia reuses and casts those uncanny objects. They acquire the energy of their donors becoming “ill objects”, they have to be treated with fragility in order to be saved from disappearance. Following the "ex-voto" series, the artist is now presenting the pice "Elegy to the sea movement with talcum powder" using a material that is used literally to cure irritated skin, turning it into a poetical landscape.

What happen when very little pieces of freshwater ice brake off an iceberg? They float in the water because they are less dense than the water they are immersed in. When an iceberg melts, it makes a fizzing sound. Julia uses those images to reflect on the permanent motion of materiality as a force for her work. Her work could have the same ephemeral and poetic qualities, where an apparent fragility becomes a solid and powerful statement.

Julia was born in Barcelona in 1981. She studied Design at Goldsmiths College, where she produced poetic objects that troubled everyday expectations of the utilitarian object. She is currently following a postgraduate degree in Fine Art at Chelsea College in London. Her exhibitions include: 'Marking/Erasing', Viewfinder Photography Gallery, London (2008) . The Old Truman Brewery. London (2005), and Jazkukion, Kyoto, Japan (2004)

Text by Rosa Lleó