Amèlia Riera: Mr. Death

The exhibition focuses mainly on her most rebellious works produced between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, a period coinciding with the end of Francoism and Spain’s transition to democracy. It was the period in which denunciation permeated all facets of her work and the artist created two of her main series: the “Ex-votos” and the “Sade Series”, which were fundamental to her trajectory and earned her the fame – or infamy – of being a necrophiliac and sadist.

While the artist’s work ranges from paintings to installations, drawing, graphics and even the creation of her own character, this exhibition shines the spotlight on her ‘cruel objects’, in which her constant critique becomes most evident. A battle that is not limited to fighting the Franco regime, but also targets everything else. This calls for new readings from today’s point of view to show the topicality of the themes dealt with: the subversion of the archetypes used to represent women and their sexuality, the reflection on the lack of communication between heterosexual couples, the visibility of power relations, bodily disciplining – the body governed, subjugated and even dispossessed – and subjectivity. All seasoned with an existentialism that has been at the heart of Amèlia‘s work from the very beginning and which surfaces here by taking up a part of her last unrealised exhibition project, a cry about the fleetingness of life, the rapid passage of time and the “funereal vertigo”.