Ivana Flores: The Milky Way of the Mice

The Milky Way of the Mice is the first solo exhibition of Spanish painter Ivana Flores in the United Arab Emirates. In her work, Ivana inhabits different fields of experience: Reality, dream, everyday life and imagination merge at a turning point of boundless consciousness. Female characters undergo manifold transformations in essence and shape without losing the central place of the self, dwelling in strange worlds of magic and wonder, but also of contradiction and alienation. Ivana’s characteristic wonderlands, set against sites of abeyance, are mysterious two-layer compositions, almost theatrical, filled with intimate debris, sewn together from the expanse of memory. ‘The Milky Way of the Mice’ denotes the dual nature of the world: Mythology –creation stories, fables, legends is more than a narrative device; it is a psychological strategy to make the world understandable. Taking cue from the epic grandeur of historical painting, Flores constructs her body of work as a timeless primeval story with archetypes –both anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, juxtaposing eras and configurations. Is the painter trying to imagine a different world? Perhaps, but her starting point is none other than the crisis of our present one. In ‘The Milky Way of the Mice’, Ivana Flores projects out different universes of viewing and feeling, stretching our perception to include also alternative futures that are always latent, suspended, in permanent but anxious wait to awake at once from the abeyance of invisibility.