'Dominica Sánchez. Espais Fronterers' at the Espai Guinovart Foundation

The Espai Guinovart Foundation opens on October 22 at 12:30 p.m. the Dominica Sánchez exhibition. Espais Fronterers, curated by Conxita Oliver. The exhibition can be visited until February 18, 2024.

There are few artists with such a pronounced sincerity of approach that they can withstand the shocks of the current art scene. Dominica Sánchez (Barcelona, 1945) is a survivor of a group of female artists who has worked tirelessly to create a personal work, far removed from the fashions of the moment. Her creation - be it painting, sculpture or drawing - is characterized by a rigorous and austere language born from her experience as a daughter of the post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s. A strong and passionate woman; an artist and a mother who has fought against the tide to materialize her particular mark, while fearlessly redefining her work steeped in life experiences. Contrary to what it might seem at first glance, his lyrical abstraction - which seems to be made from a cold constructivism of an architectural order - is the result of an introspective attitude that formulates experiential correspondences. The great characteristic of the work of Dominica Sánchez has been and is that of searching for the foundation, through a poetics of minimums, with total measure and demand. This reductionist process also affects color, which is seen framed in monochrome and in the minimized contrast that fights between the mental and the sensual, between rationality and emotion, in a true balance of bipolarities.

The retrospective journey that he presents at the Fundació Privada Espai Guinovart Agramunt, is a new bet through a selection of drawings and a selection of sculptures to approach the manifest tension that occurs in his cosmos, always in a counterpoint of opposites: empty and full, straight and curved, transparency and opacity, light and darkness. In a coexistence of opposites, rigor and expansion, analysis and sentiment, fluidity and staticism, concealment and discovery... they debate in a game of vibrations. Vacant places, silent places through which one has the feeling of contemplating the spiritual matter of reality. Hybrid territories where the confluence and alternation of different, but complementary, views pass through. Peripheries, perimeters and thresholds that not only seek the possibility of understanding the territory, but also of transforming it.

With sobriety and nudity of approaches, both his sculptures and his drawings value the essence through a poetics of minimums. A work stripped of iconographic elements that has reached such a formal synthesis that the protagonists are silence and monochrome. For Dominica Sánchez, drawing is the vehicle of thought because this medium is the manifestation that makes visible the freedom of action. The counterpositions raised by the agile and light curves, traced in pencil, and the dense and opaque geometries compose a balanced space that shows its inner contradictions. It was precisely drawing that eventually led her to discover the possibilities of the third dimension. "The bulk of my work consisted of drawing and it was like drawing with scissors and cardboard; from here the models kept coming out and that's how the sculptures appeared, like an encounter with form in a different way." Heir to the tradition of constructivist sculpture, its volumes - which are projected into space as if they were drawings in the air in black iron or lacquered in colors - are built using primary structures and elementary forms, recreated through ›an order in permanent metamorphosis. He values the void not as a passive absence but as a space that generates energy.

The Dominica Sánchez exhibition. Espais fronterers establishes a close dialogue with the creations of Josep Guinovart; two soca-rel artists, two born fighters and non-conformists who have always defended freedom, as well as values and vital references.