FOR SALE/Pelayo Varela
2017
From Friday 27 October, the Plaza del Centro Niemeyer will host a new art exhibition: “288.987.145”, a site-specific intervention by the artist Pelayo Varela which inaugurates the cycle “The Free Curve”, curated by Avelino Sala. Pelayo Varela’s work has always effectively questioned the very meaning of art. With 288.987.145 he poses a game of contradictions that is not very different from life itself. Varela surprises the public, in the time of the titular obsession and the JASP biography, with a series of curricula vitae made in the guise of anonymity: that is, his own biography is constructed as a piece, in turn changing, because each project brings with it another line in preparation for a new piece. “In the time of the artist who is consumed quickly, in the time in which the market “burns” artists mercilessly and in which gallery owners misinterpret their youth and prioritise their work, finding the work of Pelayo Varela is a breath of fresh air that brings us to the essential: that the best stage of the artist is that of maturity, where the path of art converges with the moment in which one is already capable of looking back and rethinking what has been done”, says the curator Avelino Sala. Imma Prieto has pointed out about Varela’s work that “it is based on a reflection engendered in the question of identity. His research is always a way of underpinning, not doubt, but the question of the self. The Asturian artist builds a discourse on the subject by assuming the impossibility of delimiting the identity limits that they try to impose on us. At the same time, he plays with artistic practice itself. A practice that he dissects in two ways: on the one hand, that which leads us to a re-signification of what the artist is or is not, and on the other, the endless frivolities that the art world gives off. All of this is nothing more than a metaphor for how we function in the so-called social environment”. Pelayo Varela (Oviedo, 1969) lives and works between Madrid and Xà bia. His work has been shown in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Spanish Academy in Rome, the Hirshorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Temp Art Space (New York) and the Hirshorn Museum (Washington, D.C.). Temp Art Space (New York), Muca Roma (Mexico DF), Bienal de Artes Visuales del Istmo Centroamericano-BAVIC (Guatemala), Centre of Arts Frankston (Melbourne), Instituto Cabañas (Guadalajara, Mexico), Fundación Joan Miró or Fundación Tà pies (both in Barcelona). Since 1985 he has held solo and group exhibitions. In 1995 he created the Ego Art Centre, a project presented, among other venues, at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Oviedo and Cruce, Madrid.