The Viceroy. Image Center presents "Mrs. Death. Amèlia Riera"

The Viceroy. Image Center opens July 21 at 7 p.m. Mrs. Death. Amèlia Riera, curated by Pere Pedrals and which can be visited until November 6.

Amèlia Riera (Barcelona, 1928-2019) was an unclassifiable artist and, at the same time, a pioneering author in terms of her practice from a gender perspective, a surrealism clearly far removed from her contemporaries and a work on fetish and the theatricality that anticipates the present time.

This exhibition revolves mainly around his most controversial work, produced between the mid-sixties and late seventies, a period that coincides with the years of late Francoism and the Transition, when the denunciation permeates all facets of his work and creates two of its main series, the one of the Ex-voto and the Sade Series, keys in its trajectory, and that were worth the fame to him of necrophiliac and sadistic. While his work ranges from painting to installations, drawing, graphic work and even the creation of his own character, this exhibition focuses on his "cruel objects", which it is where his ongoing criticism becomes most evident.

A struggle that is not only anti-Franco, but shoots against everything, and that requires new readings, already from the present, to prove its full validity: the subversion of the archetypes used to represent women and their sexuality, the reflection on the problem of incommunicado in the heterosexual couple, the visibility of power relations, the discipline of the body, governed, subdued and even expropriated, subjectivity.

All tinged with an existentialism that is at the heart of Amelia's work from the beginning and that here emerges to the surface when she recovers part of her last unrealized exhibition project, a cry for the transience of life, the rapid passage of time, the "funeral vertigo."