Lola Lasurt / Patricia de Muga – Galeria Joan Prats

We’d like to start off with a key question to set things up: when did you start working together? How did you meet?

Patricia

We met in 2013, if I’m not mistaken, because Lola’s first exhibition in the gallery came in 2014. I think we met personally when she did her exhibition at the Fundació Miró. I had seen her previous work. In fact, I think I went to see the exhibition without Lola first, and I contacted her afterwards. At that point, we started to meet up and chat. Her first solo exhibition at the gallery was a year after this encounter, in 2014.

Are you especially interested in getting to know young artists’ practices?

Patricia

The whole gallery team is constantly on the lookout for young artists, and particularly those who are nearest to us, who are from the same context. A lot of artists are doing good things. But it’s about finding that little extra something, right?

What do you mean?

Patricia

It’s not just a case of doing good things: I think you need to have something different, special. And something that connects with the other artists we have here in the gallery. Because we’re always trying to build bridges.

In our case, in our gallery, there are artists we’ve been working with for a long time. We even represent artists who have died, who started working with my father all those years ago. So, we try to make sure there’s some sort of coherence between them all.

What about you, Lola: were you familiar with the gallery? What did you think when they made you the proposal?

Lola

Of course. It’s a legendary gallery. I knew about it and followed it from a distance, though I didn’t know anyone who worked there. Obviously, I was surprised when they got in touch with me. It was during the exhibition I put on at Espai13 at the Fundació Miró, ‘Doble autorización’ [Double Authorisation], as part of the Preventive Archaeology season.

At that time, I was doing a two-year residency in Belgium, at Hisk, in Ghent. Previously, I got an exchange residency grant between Hangar [Barcelona] and Cape Town, South Africa. When the exhibition in the Fundació Miró ended, we opened the exhibition at Joan Prats.

Patricia

Yes, in late 2014.

It’s true that not much time passed until we did our first exhibition. Because you had a lot of really interesting material.

Lola

It surprised me because I was at a point where, due to the nature of my work, I thought it would be good to be in a gallery that understood my projects and these strange methods of mine. I wanted to find the right setting where I could sell some of my projects, basically, and make it all sustainable.

To be honest, I saw Prats almost like a case study for my projects. I mean… I always end up at the time of Spain’s transition to democracy, and Prats was important at that time. Sert renovated the space in ’76… So, I could have easily ended up researching Galeria Joan Prats. Perhaps it could be nice to do that project one day?

Patricia

Maybe it would be good to do it.

Lola

The first exhibition was a project that examined a square’s change of name in the town of Mont-roig del Camp: from Generalísimo Franco to Joan Miró, in 1979. Of course, the link between Prats and Miró is very strong, and the gallery’s role was to reformulate things and see what the role of contemporary art was in the first few years of this fledgling democracy. Galeria Joan Prats and what it has represented were already really interesting to me on a historical level, obviously. And then suddenly… I wasn’t expecting it at all, because I’d got it in my head that the gallery only worked with very renowned, older artists. I would never have imagined, but it’s true that it was a time of renewal for them, and they were looking for young people.

I remember Alicia Kopf started at the same time as you, so she coincided with this period of change

Patricia

Alicia came a bit before. We invited her to take part in Art Nou. I think it was in 2013. And she did this exhibition, as part of the Art Nou programme, in the Rambla de Catalunya space. That was a spectacular project, too… We hadn’t incorporated her as one of the gallery’s artists at the time, but things developed naturally: we collaborated on various things, and later on she put on a solo exhibition, also on Rambla de Catalunya.

From that moment, you started to open the gallery up to younger artists a bit more.

Patricia

I’ve been working at the gallery since 2009. The time came when I wanted to start to incorporate artists who were closer to my generation, and subsequently, artists younger than me, of course. The gallery was already working with people like Erick Beltrán and Javier Peñafiel, who were the young artists at the time. But it’s true that we didn’t start involving younger generations until I’d been at the gallery for a while. My father and I discussed it and thought it was great that the gallery could create this intergenerational dialogue. That was when Alicia, Lola and others.

How do you view your working relationship? As Lola already pointed out, her processes are very long, with very distinctive dynamics. How has this working relationship developed over time?

Lola

Well, when they contacted me, it was actually to ask me to do a solo exhibition. Then, quite naturally, I ended up being part of the gallery. On top of that, wasn’t mine the first exhibition in this new space, Patricia?

Patricia

It was the second. We wanted to highlight this intergenerational dialogue between artists, because, really, we were starting a new chapter in a new space. We opened with Luis Gordillo in September, and then came Lola. I think it was wonderful, don’t you think? He was the oldest and she was the youngest at that time.

Lola

Yes. As I said, I was living in Belgium at that time, and I had just finished a really long project, which I was doing for around two and a half years: ‘Ejercicio de Ritmo’ [Rhythm Exercise], about the public monument to Francesc Layret on Plaça Goya, which was really close to the gallery. I was looking into the life and work of Francesc Layret a lot. And then, suddenly, this is where Layret lived, on Carrer de Balmes, right by Gran Via. The same street we are on now, but one block further down. In fact, he was assassinated coming out of his building. Thugs sent by the Employers’ Federation shot him seven times. Patricia told me the new space was at number 54 on Carrer de Balmes. I had just made the video, but I hadn’t shown it to anyone yet. A small ceramic memorial was put up on the wall of the building where Layret lived in 1979. I really like that piece. I made a rubbing of it, which I included in the exhibition. I also included my first pictorial frieze… It was quite a big coincidence for me. As though the stars had aligned.

The pictorial frieze is a format I have used repeatedly, and it started with the recreation of a football match that took place in Belgium (‘The Match. Married women against single women, an initiative by Manuel Ramírez, the barman at Club Federico Garci?a Lorca, Brussels, 1976’, 2014). It’s the biggest project I’ve done in Belgium, and it was the product of my residency there. I researched Club Federico Garci?a Lorca, which was formed in Brussels during the early years of the dictatorship, for and to exiles, with agreements with Central European factories, or politicians. I got in touch with some ex-members of the Club, and when I looked into it further, I found this football match, ‘married women against single women’, organised by the club’s barman, Manuel Ramírez. A Belgian collective asked me for a video on something to do with the club.

I was fascinated by that football match, played during the very last celebration organised by the Spanish Communist Party before the Moncloa Pact and also before the party split up. That project looks at connections and separations on personal and collective levels.

We displayed the frieze, which I hadn’t exhibited yet, in the first part of the gallery. Inside the gallery, we showed the project linked to the Layret monument, which was based on a Super 8 film.

Patricia

Yes, it’s true that there were a series of coincidences. We came into contact at a time when Lola’s work was very relevant. That initial exhibition was great, people really liked it, and we were starting to get to know each other. And then these things happen naturally, right? It was all very easy. Really, it’s a personal relationship that has to work both ways: there has to be trust, and we need to be able to work together and talk about things. It’s not just about the artist being good and us being able to represent them; it has to work on a personal level, too. It’s difficult for us to collaborate with an artist if that trust isn’t there.

Have you done any other exhibitions together since 2015? Or just the one you are working on now for Barcelona Gallery Weekend?

Patricia

We’ve taken Lola’s work to various fairs and collective exhibitions. On an individual level, she did a double exhibition with Javier Peñafiel a couple of years ago. He’s another artist from the gallery, and a connection formed with him.

Lola

We really wanted to do something together, but we were always busy with work. It was the perfect opportunity to strike up a more profound dialogue. So, if I count that one as a solo exhibition, this will be the third one.

Lola, your work process is very long. You usually do extensive research, so the gallery needs to respect the time you need for that. Does the gallery accompany you during this process, or is there some other kind of support?

Lola

The gallery is always there. When I start a project, first there’s a lot of work to do, which can take years. At that stage, I work separately to the gallery. It’s a research process, and I’m an amateur historian investigating memory, which I find in historical archives of all kinds. Collections I decide to go to, often without respecting where one would normally go. And collections of many different types, some oral, and even family collections, depending on the project.

There, methods and complex strategies come into play to formalise the project in some way or another. But it’s true that before anything gets formalised, quite a lot of time can go by for some projects. And in this task I carry out where I rescue these episodes from the past and bring them to the present and see what happens, I have a lot of pictorial experience. Lately, and especially during the ‘Juego de Niños’ [Child’s Play] project for La Capella, which dealt with psychoanalytical themes and Winnicott and got me thinking a lot about painting and the maternal relationship right when I had just given birth, I’ve been viewing my relationship with painting as a maternal relationship. It’s the oldest tradition, one that’s always there for me. And I often need to leave, but I always come back to it, because it’s the tradition that matters the most to me. It’s a bit like the complex relationship we have with our mothers as we mature. I think something similar happens to me with painting. I take some distance, I move towards video, I move towards other types of language… But painting is always there too, as a need to filter. It’s the first filter through the body of what I have found.

That’s why the historical frieze format suits me, because it literally tells a story relating to a very specific architectural space, which is what I normally work with. And the historical frieze, in terms of involvement of the body, is not the same as a single, static painting. It has a performative aspect I can’t find in static paintings. I’ve been doing a lot of friezes lately: for me, they are almost like choreographies. But now and again I go back to producing single, more traditional, more static paintings, depending on what I feel like.

For this latest edition of Barcelona Gallery Weekend, I understand that you’ve already defined what you’re going to present.

Patricia

Lola has proposed a theme, a concept, and she’s already prepared some of the pieces. I think the idea is very clear, so now we’re working on how we’ll display it.

At the beginning, the work is very personal and difficult to finalise. Here at the gallery, we can offer more support in the later stages.

As for BGW, as soon as we finish this interview we’re going to continue to work on it!

Lola

The Barcelona Gallery Weekend project is the one that will have the most involvement from the gallery. Because it’s a project started from scratch with the gallery. Here, what will happen is… Well, there’s a significant proportion of my projects that provide me with a bond with someone I want to meet or with whom I want to have some sort of relationship. Sometimes I’m aware of this, sometimes I’m not, because I don’t even know if that person exists.

For this new exhibition, I’m doing that directly… I’m inviting them to build a bond directly. This time, it’s Esther Guillén, a ceramicist who lives in Santa Pau, a tiny village in the province of Girona. Her ceramic work is incredible. For a long time now, and in a natural way, I’ve been contemplating the idea of doing ‘pictorial curations’. That’s what I’m calling them for now, as a provisional name. But now, I want to do something I really feel like doing, impulsively. I really feel like painting Esther’s work. Not painting on the ceramic, of course, because her ceramic pieces are already painted. I mean painting her work two-dimensionally, on canvas. There’s something in it that draws my attention, because I think it’s fun: painting abstract art figuratively. And that’s part of something that hasn’t been considered yet.

And it’s a copy, too, right?

Lola

It would touch on themes of appropriation strategies. There would be a big debate to be had… To be honest, I haven’t thought about it much yet. But now and again, just like I analyse images from the past, I like analysing other people’s work. Well, in fact… I’ve been analysing for a long time… Somehow, at the moment, I’m analysing visually, just like a critic or a curator who looks at the artist’s work on a more textual and philosophical level. I carry out this visual analysis through painting. Just like I can analyse a very specific moment or event in history that interests me. An artwork, a piece of art, is an event in my eyes… I also enjoy this debate around subjects like appropriation. When the art of our era is discussed, people will say it’s appropriationist. As for the project, I do not consider that I am doing copies of anything since, I don’t worry too much to be exact and in the end I took them quite to my terrain. But I’m going to repeat things; and it is in this action or insistence on repeating that something new can emerge. In these re-creation processes I am simply trying to understand what I have found and what It can arise when sharing it with more people.

Patricia

In fact, for this exhibition, I think the term you used – ‘curation’ – is very appropriate, because your proposal is about making associations between Esther Guillén’s work and that of other artists who came before, thus creating new connections.

Lola

Yes, exactly. Both Esther and her husband, who also work on ceramics, never abandoned their artistic practice… But they also made pottery to sell in the street: ceramic pieces seen as artisanal items, and souvenirs from Santa Pau. I think they are wonderful, too. On top of that, both use a very specific ceramic technique – in fact, prehistoric techniques – with complex clays, colours and glazes. Sometimes, they use volcanic mud, because it’s a volcanic area. It’s really interesting. Their work is incredible, and I want to analyse and see it visually.

To wrap up, we wanted to ask you what you think makes relationships between artists and gallerists last.

Patricia

Mutual understanding and trust, don’t you think? And hard work.

Lola

Yes, exactly. Yes, there’s a personal trust aspect. You have to trust that person. And you need a good, consistent, fair work environment.

Patricia

And commitment from both sides. When they become part of a gallery, the artist commits to working and providing pieces for us to display, whether for a solo exhibition, as in this case, or for a fair. We, meanwhile, are committed to showing the work and making sure it reaches the public, individuals and institutions. We set the pace. That’s why it’s great when you have the chance to accompany an artist from the beginning of their career, so that you can accompany them in this growth. I think that’s the best thing about our work. If you start collaborating with a more renowned artist, of course it’s exciting, but… If I had to choose, that’s the part that brings meaning to what we do: being able to accompany someone from the very beginning. We like long relationships, because that’s how you can work well together. But of course, for that to happen, there needs to be that mutual understanding on a personal level.

Lola

Yes, and respect for each person’s methods, which can be complex. There should be no attempt to change them, just respect and support. It’s also important to understand that you, as an artist, have limitations. In my case, for example, I need time to cover my responsibilities in life while carrying out the research I do. The gallery puts your work in places you would never have reached otherwise. In some cases, someone with links to the project might end up acquiring it. It makes sense for this to happen, in my case. And herein lies the reason for working with the gallery.