Eva Fábregas at garcía | galería

Artist: Eva Fábregas

Exhibition title: Polifilia

Venue: garcía | galería, Madrid, Spain

Date: November 17, 2018 – January 26, 2019

Photography: Roberto Ruiz, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and garcía | galería, Madrid

garcía | galería is proud to present the first solo show of Eva Fábregas in Madrid. Her work investigates the realm of the somatic and the sensorial experience, wondering how our bodies, desires and affections are reshaped through the policies of industrial design. In her work, the tension between organic forms and synthetic materials is the result of a constant stylization. This tension serves to explore the plasticity of the body within the framework of consumer society.

The title of the exhibition refers to the term that biologists use to define those groups of organisms with common characteristics that do not share a recent common ancestor. That is, mammals and birds are warm-blooded vertebrates, but in both cases this character has developed independently during the evolution of each of them. But polifilia is also, in its etymological meaning, the love of several or many, what has recently been called polyamory.

This case of homonymy serves Fabregas to address the main issues of his most recent work. The exhibition presents a new series of drawings on fake leather or, as it is called in spanish, “polipiel”, based on a morphological study of all kinds of tools, prostheses and ergonomic objects that we use directly on the human body. Some have a therapeutic function and an ergonomic design. Some exist to correct functions and others to correct our position or even to provide pleasure but they are always marked by their reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the body. These drawings have a taxonomic ambition: they are a classification of forms, of that in which the imprint of the natural becomes evident as much as its artificial origin.

The artist’s drive to gather and classify leads her to study the different forms of these objects as if it were a grammar, in which the variations between one and the other build a morphological language. And it is here when polifilia becomes clear: when we discover that regardless of its original function, the final result shares a series of common formal characters.

Finally, also the new sculpture we are presenting shares a formal correspondence with those objects although in this case the sensory and the tactile are manifested above all in an exaggerated, monstrous or even comic way. As the scale increases, we definitively move away from the detail of the human body to overcome it and fill the exhibition space until we relate to the viewer in a way completely opposite to that of the original object.

Eva Fàbregas (Barcelona, 1988) studied in Barcelona and London. For many years she has been part of Coro Vivaldi where she recorded a long discography. She has shown her work at Fundació Miró and La Capella in Barcelona, Kunstraum in London or La Casa Encendida in Madrid. Lives and works in London.