28/06 – 12/08/2018
Naturalezas
Nieves González
Nieves González (Oviedo, 1988) graduated in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and studied two specialties that have allowed her to reconcile her work and plastic life, in equal parts: design and education. From her first works you can see a multidisciplinary aptitude used in the use of materials and resources that reaffirm the message it conveys. Acid colors and evocative phrases consolidate a concept that has become a determining brand of all her work. Her pieces underline a direct aesthetic influence of the advertising of the 50s – in which the female figure materialized as propaganda in order to encourage it to be purchased.
In all its glory, the use of several disciplines such as collage, photomontage, sculpture and mastering materials such as plastics, sprays or resins stand out. Her first works are characterized by the use of painting and drawing mainly, which has served her to achieve a thorough technical skill that can be seen in all her works. Her creations focus on women, on society and against society, where she explores the obstacles that have been created in a gender construction that interferes with her self-definition and that of all. Women and food, women and the kitchen and objectified women star in the series “Ravings on the table” and “War in the kitchen”; in these, she shows her way of understanding the relationship of women with food, interpreted from two perspectives; the edible woman and the working woman in what was supposedly her work space, the kitchen. Between 2015 and 2016 she develops “Sweet Girls”, a series that claims the relationship of women with food, sex and female intimacy. Supported by an obvious baroque decoration, the artist elevates and dignifies, on an altar that connects with Mexican religious aesthetics, everything that is not intended for women: sweet girls who do not eat, do not enjoy their sexuality and do not menstruate. The outcome of this claim generated personal iconography with a Kitsch language where colors, shapes and striking elements predominated that were combined with each other. The presence of patterns and prints in acrylics and watercolors on canvas, contrasted with the compositional simplicity of the world of still life.
For “Natures”, Nieves González continues with the will to transgress meanings in the prolongation of her previous series. Again, she elevates objects of her daily life that say more about our contemporary way of life than many other testimonies. In a simple but effective way she portrays, with total realism, common elements; food and objects of the feminine intimate universe. In these still lives the “Natures” are delimited in suggestive and decorative prints, sometimes own and other appropriate, where an obvious technical preciousness stands out. The colors, provocative and complementary, are reaffirmed with lyricisms that reflect the deepest feelings and thoughts of the artist. Markers and acrylics on canvas, revitalize a genre that began in the seventeenth century and today Nieves extols it making it a magnificent means of protest, expression and plastic dexterity.
María Martínez Vallina
