Adolfo & Juan Schlosser. Two visions of Land Art

It is a pleasure for us to invite you to the opening of Adolfo & Juan Schlosser. Two visions of Land Art. This exhibition of father and son is a tribute to the father, the great artist of Austrian origin Adolfo Schlosser (1939-2004) and a deserved recognition to the son, Juan Schlosser (1981), his closest collaborator and most diligent disciple during the last artistic stage of the master. The hand and look of the son are in the last works of the father. And the footprint of the father is in the photographs that we show here.

The pictorial work of Adolfo gathered here was carried out in Spain between 1975 and 1985. During this decade, Schlosser married and had three children, of whom Juan is the youngest. This is a time of personal happiness and professional success that leads this artist to express himself through color and to develop a vitalist pictorial work deeply rooted in nature.

The materials are simple: brown paper, cardstock and natural pigments that led the artist to experiment with and create his own color palette. In these papers he captures the same themes that he previously worked on in his sculptures but from an optimistic perspective.

While his sculptures capture the harshness of his childhood during World War II and the postwar period, the paintings represent the vitalistic spirit that invades him as a result of fatherhood. His pictorial work gets filled with color, energy and dynamism as a celebration of life in communion with nature. Schlosser himself kept this work out of commercial circuits due to market strategies since what was expected from him was a work without color, dramatic and dark. Mountains, lakes, skies, beaches and insects generate an expansive nature created from loose, free and masterful brushstrokes. Also from this stage are his best self-portraits, with which he redefines his identity.

Juan Schlosser began his work at a very young age, strongly motivated by the artistic environment that reigned in his home. Being just a teenager, he was the right hand of his father. He soon explored a variety of artistic expressions such as sculpture, photography and design, which would later merge in his search through land art. The theme of his work is always the same: nature as energy in all its forms and manifestations. Juan observes and reproduces structures of sacred geometry through the use of patterns and shapes found in nature.

The works that can be seen in the show are mostly photographed ephemeral sculptures. Of his work ‘Three Trees’, he says: “I try to reflect how all the structures in nature are related. Everything starts from a center and expands outwards, dividing and multiplying. Three trees emerge from a center and, in turn, out of each tree the structure of a flower with six petals appears... As in the metaphor of Indra’s network, in each of the parts the whole is contained and the whole in turn contains the parts”. Thus, taking inspiration from natural forms and the generative geometry that permeates all things, he has developed his own language.

Within this concept he began to build large-scale installations, festival scenery and architecture, which earned him a reputation for showcasing the vast and diverse benefits of eco-architecture in a diverse range of schemes including eco-conscious domestic resorts in Bali, art galleries in Europe and music festivals all around the world. During the last decade he has been one of the central figures in the design and creation of the architectural language adopted by ‘The New Earth Project’.

He has founded the architectural design firm, Bio Arc, from which today he works the relationship between structure, form, sacred geometry and the dynamics of vital energy with the intention of continuing and expanding the vision of bioarchitecture as a means to redefine the architectural practices and contribute to generating a scientific design base to create a regenerative architectural system.

N2 Galería

Inauguration Thursday, December 16, 2021