Armando Andrade Tudela at CarrerasMugica

Artist: Armando Andrade Tudela

Exhibition title: Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel)

Venue: CarrerasMugica, Bilbao, Spain

Date: March 4 – May 20, 2022

Photography: Daniel Mera / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and CarrerasMugica, Bilbao

CarrerasMugica is pleased to present, from 4 March to 20 May, Como si fuera un canal extraño, Armando Andrade Tudela’s third exhibition at the gallery.

“To make an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela (…) is to experience transition. (…) It is to conceive a space-time in which the works, in order to escape the fixity of their mode of existence, remain in a form of ambiguity, in a process of transformation or adaptation to paradoxical desires. Whether addressing Peruvian modernity, European empathy, the pressure of things on the body or the traumas of academicism, the work never ceases to evade a univocal reading, submitting itself to oblique gazes from both sides of the ocean”. ¹

Having lived in Lima (where he was born in 1975) and having trained in London and the Netherlands, before staying in France and Berlin, Armando Andrade Tudela is interested in the projections and translations of imaginaries and thoughts that exist from one culture to another. His work focuses on the circulation of forms in heterogeneous contexts. Through sculptures, drawings, photographs or films, he examines precisely how aesthetic ideas are translated and assimilated locally, for example, how the modernist shock has been disseminated and interpreted on the South American continent. In doing so, hⁱe confronts a formal vocabulary related to minimalism with forms or images taken from everyday life, art history or popular culture. In his most recent research, he experiments with the exhibition space as a “folding space” in which combinations of different elements leave meanings in a potential state. Like many artists of his generation, he tries to create an environment that does not have a single centre of gravity, but unfolds multiple, endless ones.

Como si fuera un canal extraño, it occupies two different spaces in the gallery. The nave exhibits five new works. Four of them belong to the series Aglomeración made of perforated and brightly painted sheet steel and containing various materials such as glass or steel cables. The fifth of them entitled Hard Times, Hard Techno refers us, like Eje Bilbao x 3 (20 cuerpos) (2020-2022), to a history of violence, punishment and its direct relationship with the body. This space is completed by Burladorxs, an updated version of the work Isadora (2017). The studio hosts an installation in which the work Materia sobre materia y espiritu (2019-2022), a construction in formica and wood (which also includes a quilt, a bell, photocopies and other elements that are gradually added to the work), appears surrounded by paintings, some already packed, others on view, by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa and Gabriela Kraviez, whose exhibitions preceded this one by Andrade Tudela. Como si fuera un canal extraño is an exhibition that aims to articulate the relations, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, between the history of representation and the history of barbarism, between architecture and habitat, helmet and trauma.

[1] Elfi TURPIN in Armando Andrade Tudela, Travailler et alors ne pas travailler – Autoeclipse, éditions Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, Berlín, 2020, 208 p.

Armando Andrade Tudela, Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel), 2022, exhibition view, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao

Armando Andrade Tudela, Aglomeración (RAL7024), 2022, Perforated and painted sheet steel, iron, glass cup, Wood, 102 x 291 x 148 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Aglomeración (RAL6019), 2022, Perforated and painted sheet steel, iron, glass, Wood, 149 x 291 x 148 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Aglomeración (RAL901), 2022, Perforated and painted sheet steel, iron, glass beaker, steel wire rope, 139 x 297 x 148 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel), 2022, exhibition view, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao

Armando Andrade Tudela, Aglomeración (RAL901), 2022, Perforated and painted sheet steel, iron, glass beaker, steel wire rope, 139 x 297 x 148 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Aglomeración (RAL2004), 2022, Perforated and painted sheet steel, iron, sand, 163 x 209 x 116 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel), 2022, exhibition view, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao

Armando Andrade Tudela, BurladorXs, 2017-2022, Stainless steel, hay, Egoa chair by Stua, 90 x 50 x 50 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Hard Times, Hard Techno, 2022, Aluminium column, sandbags, wood, polyurethane resin, Gore-Tex, 209 x 40 x 13 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel), 2022, exhibition view, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao

Armando Andrade Tudela, Hard Times, Hard Techno, 2022, Aluminium column, sandbags, wood, polyurethane resin, Gore-Tex, 209 x 40 x 13 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Eje Bilbao x 3 (20 cuerpos), 2020-2022, Wood, iron pipes, 55 x 1486 x 530 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel), 2022, exhibition view, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao

Armando Andrade Tudela, Materia sobre materia y espíritu, 2019-2022, Formica and wood construction, bell, quilt, photocopies, 155 x 190 x 100 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel), 2022, exhibition view, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao

Armando Andrade Tudela, Materia sobre materia y espíritu, 2019-2022, Formica and wood construction, bell, quilt, photocopies, 155 x 190 x 100 cm

Armando Andrade Tudela, Como si fuera un canal extraño (As if it were a strange channel), 2022, exhibition view, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao