Forever Young: Katherine Bernhardt, Javier Calleja, George Condo, Kaws, Yoshitomo Nara, Erik Parker, Marion Peck, Mark Ryden, Peter Saul, Kenny Scharf, Todd Schorr, Rose Wylie
VETA by Fer Francés is pleased to present Forever Young, a group exhibition that brings together works by some of the most prestigious artists in the contemporary art scene worldwide. Artists who have forged a celebrated and enduring career, maintaining over time a prolific, consistent body of work of exceptional quality. The title of the exhibition alludes precisely to their unwavering desire to maintain a constant creative freshness and vitality.
Childhood is commonly perceived as a stage of life characterized by extraordinary creativity and a special lucidity, associated with a playful attitude. This notion is reflected in the archetypal image of the child capable of transforming a simple toy into countless forms of entertainment, thus transcending the original purpose conceived by the adult. The artists in this exhibition have cultivated this same childlike gaze, preserving it from the cynicism and disillusionment of adulthood, and employ it as a tool to revitalize popular culture and its iconic elements. In this way, they reinterpret and reappropriate the diverse cultural inputs received throughout their lives, turning them into raw material for their artistic expression.
The everyday, for example, achieves a freshness and profound expressiveness in the hands of legendary artist Rose Wylie (UK, 1934). Characterized by a style that might seem simple at first glance, her work is meditations on representation and its iteration composes a visual rhyme in the gallery space. Contemporary of Wylie and another living legend of the art world, Peter Saul (USA, 1934), approaches pop culture to elaborate highly expressive compositions that have generated a whole school. Along the same lines, Erik Parker (Germany, 1968), who was Saul's student, as well as Kenny Scharf (USA, 1958), Todd Schorr (USA, 1954) or Katherine Bernhardt (USA, 1975), each one from his point of view, play with high and low pop and underground culture, with icons and fashion, placing them under a lysergic and multiplying light.
On the other hand, the most canonical art history in the form of different avant-gardes and movements of the 20th century find and recover an explicit relevance in the practice of authors like George Condo (USA, 1957), Marion Peck (Philippines, 1963) or Mark Ryden (USA, 1963). Artists who, from very different approaches, reinterpret what is firstfamiliar until they generate a new meaning whose access is no longer so direct and, therefore, much richer.
Finally, we could group together those artists who have created a whole aesthetic and coherent universe, populated by characters that have become icons and worldwide phenomena. Drawing from different cultural backgrounds, from Japanese animation to American graffiti, Yoshitomo Nara (Japan, 1969), KAWS (USA, 1974) and Javier Calleja (Spain, 1971), invite us to travel through their own world, crossed by a humor not exempt of vulnerability.
