Georgia Gardner Gray: La Morosa Española

In her second exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Georgia Gardner Gray presents a group of new paintings that look to a peculiar Spanish institution, the cobrador del frac (translated as the “frock-coated debt collector”), to examine universal notions of social performativity.

Throughout her multidisciplinary practice that incorporates painting, sculpture and theatre, Gardner Gray constructs a boundless world of carnivalesque scenes that host a spectrum of characters lifted from capitalist archetypes, internet subcultures and beyond. Her distinctly contemporary mise-en-scènes reach back into art history and upend its codes, with figures rendered in kaleidoscopic colours exhibiting an anxiety and detachment from their surroundings that speak to a fragile modernity.

The cobrador del frac are a curiosity in Spanish culture. Popularised in the late 1980s and still practiced today, the surreal industry sees debt-collecting agencies sending men (and it is only men – as one cobrador put it, women are not considered “imposing enough”) dressed in eccentric costumes to draw attention to and embarrass debtors into paying up.

Working with a theatricality that would likely not be tolerated elsewhere, the cobradors arrive with a sombre expression to stalk their appointed target, dressed in frockcoats, top hats and brandishing a black briefcase with “COBRADOR DEL FRAC” written across its side. Cobradors might also dress as matadors in elaborate bullfighter costumes, as monks, clowns, or even the fictional masked vigilante Zorro.