PILAR ALBARRACÍN. 'MANDALAS (ARC EN CIEL)'. Conversation with the Artist
The CGAC invites Pilar Albarracín to talk about her work Mandala (Arc en ciel) (2012), which will be exhibited at the CGAC from 18th October 2024 to 2025. It is a piece made with the panties of women in the artist's environment, with which she composes circular shapes on a canvas in the form of a mandala, a figure used in the Buddhist tradition as a visual tool for meditation.
With this work, which is part of a larger series of five other pieces (currently in the collections of the CAAC in Seville and the MUSAC in León), the artist wanted to create a participatory work in which people would be involved. As she herself explains, she collected ‘panties of all kinds, from Spain and abroad, from women who were young, old, fat, thin, lively, dull, sophisticated, etc.—different ones. The work is also a showcase of personalities, energies, spirits... without ceasing to be a vindication. It’s a spiritual representation from an almost invisible everyday object, which isn’t on display. I like that fine line between spirituality and irony and it gives me food for thought.’
Emulating the practice of mandala making by Buddhist monks, Pilar Albarracín carries out this long and laborious task in search of balance and aesthetic harmony in pieces in which she has to join together the underwear of women of very different sizes, shapes and styles. ‘It’s not perfect geometry, but in reality, perfection doesn’t exist, although real things provide data and certainties.’ Through the mandala, Albarracín seeks a transcendental connection between all the unknown women who have gifted that part of their intimacy to be transformed into artistic material. It re-signifies the garments and creates a sacred composition that combines the individual and the collective. Each panty represents a woman, hides a story and, together, they reveal the history of women from a symbolic point of view, far removed from the voyeurism and fetishism so often associated with this object.
It is a work in which the artist shows us ‘the origin of a new world.’
PILAR ALBARRACÍN (Seville, 1968) lives and works between Seville and Madrid. In 1993 she graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Seville. Since the early 1990s, her work—as one of the key creators in the renewal of artistic languages in Spain – has been shown in major collective and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums all over the world. These include the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the MoMA PS1 in New York, the Istanbul Modern Sanat Müzesi in Istanbul, the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D. C., and the Chengdu Contemporary Contemporary Image Museum. She has also participated in the Venice, Busan, Moscow, Seville, Quebec and Lyon biennials, among others.
In 2021, the artist presented at the CGAC and in the framework of the second edition of the Plataforma Performing Arts Festival, the Pilar Albarracín. Acciones Peregrinas exhibition. She also undertook the Acción Peregrina I performance in collaboration with the folkloric music and dance group Brincadeira, in which the male and female members reversed traditional gender roles in their show for this occasion.