Mallorca: Kowasa Gallery will inaugurate this Friday (April 1st) a monographic exhibition dedicated to Mariano Zuzunaga (Lima, Peru, 1953).
Mariano Zuzunaga: A Selected Offering(through June 4) coincides with the display of a second exhibition of the artist, Circular, Esther Montoriol gallery. This one is about a collective installation where his latest works –product of his experience in the creation of software images aimed at digitalization processes– dialogue with Neil Harbisson’s chromatic and sonorous designs and other artists’ works.
Mariano Zuzunaga: A… includes vintages made by the author in his native country, in the early 1970s, and series developed by him when moved to Barcelona in 1975, some forty black-and-white pictures. Expressed as peak moments of beauty, emotional exaltation and subtle perplexity, the works from this first stage pay tribute to the classics (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Harry Callahan, Minor White and Alfred Stieglitz) and their spirits.
Zuzunaga’s first steps in the field of photography go back to these works and the singular essence of his look can be felt in them, a look that will be challenging myths and the cognitive halo around photography, giving priority to a confessed devotion to what the photographic act represented to him as years went by: a “blind spot” which allows “the access to the background of our special mentality” and “teaches our eyes how to see what they wouldn’t have seen otherwise […], though what we do see is always to be guessed.”
His works from the 1980s were born from this conscience; some of them were put together in the Opus XI book (1991). Opting for the representation of an abstract world, with light and shadow as origin and end, both series include open-to-interpretation narrative sequences. Through them, we enter Zuzunaga’s mental universe, where volatile silence and docile-but-disturbing irony walk along with absolute ignorance, which means, the awareness of the absence of any answer due to the lack of the question itself. Just as described by Zuzunaga: “Photographers, as a sort of first philosophers, are dedicated to something which they probably ignore. Their pictures show a life of fragments they try to put together without knowing how to do it. Their ignorance, just as all ignorance, sets no borders. The knowledge they obtain through photography is usually only limited to remind them of just that.”
Mariano Zuzunaga (Lima, 1953) began his career back in 1972 with a work inspired in Alexander Calder’s work. He studied music, photography and history. He has been living in Barcelona since 1975. In 1980, his work was recognized during an exhibition at Joan Miró Foundation. Several public and private institutions count on his works: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (Allan Chasanoff Collection), Ansel Adams Archives (Center for Creative Photography, Tucson), Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the Museum of Art in Lima, the Museu Nacional d’Art in Cataluña, the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona and Fundació Foto Colectania.
Zuzunaga graduated in History and he got his degree in Fine Arts at Barcelona University. He’s a founding member of The Photographer+s Company, he has written numerous essays that give a renewed reflection on the activity of photographers as creators and thinkers of our time, among them El territorio fotográfico. La fotografía revisitada (Actar, 1996) and El fotógrafo y la fotografía. Nuevas sugerencias (The Photographer+s Company, 2008).
Source: Promotional note sent to A x E News
Further information: www.marianozuzunaga.com
www.thephotographerscompany.com
Mallorca, 235 – 08008 Barcelona – +34 93 487 35 88
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