Since 2016 the CGAC has been developing an annual programme to review mid-career Galician artists, which began with an exhibition on Berta Cáccamo and continued, after a brief interruption in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, with exhibitions dedicated to Álvaro Negro (2017), Nicolás Combarro (2018), Loreto Martínez Troncoso (2019) and Suso Fandiño (2022), respectively. Almudena Fernández Fariña’s exhibition is part of this programme.

Almudena Fernández Fariña (Vigo, Pontevedra, 1970) is an artist and lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Pontevedra (University of Vigo). Her work is represented in public and private collections. Her artistic work has been recognised with numerous awards and grants, including the L’Oréal Painting Award (2000), the New Values Grant (1994) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2001).

The exhibition offers a journey through Almudena Fernández Fariña’s work spanning a thirty-year career, repositioning her path, and revealing an unprecedented artist whose versatility is evident in a series of parallel processes that include photographic practices, embroidery, ceramic pieces and book-objects.

Conceived as a succession of dialogues between Almudena Fernández Fariña and some of her references, this exhibition is an invitation to trace alternative routes, discover new meanings and reactivate debates in which the spectator plays an active role.

The context, the relationship with the place, occupies a fundamental position in Almudena Fernández Fariña’s artistic and intellectual formulations, which is evident in her site-specific projects that consider the mixture of physical and topographical, formal, symbolic, historical, political, economic, social or institutional aspects that define the spaces on which the artist intervenes. These projects were collected in a documentary video that will be shown in one of the galleries.

FLOWER AND ACANTHUS. INTERVENTION BY ALMUDENA FERNÁNDEZ FARIÑA

7 July 2023 - 28 January 2024

Hall

The exhibition is completed with an intervention in the CGAC foyer. A suggestive dialogue between the minimalist purity of Álvaro Siza Vieira and the baroque style of the convent of San Domingos de Bonaval. Starting from an acanthus leaf sculpted on the convent façade, Almudena Fernández Fariña decontextualises, synthesises, repeats, and expands the motif and gives it an ornamental role that explores the explicitly decorative dimension of painting. In short, one of the great themes of her art.