Galería Rafael Ortiz opens the 2019-2020 season with the fifth individual exhibition in its Seville space by artist Carmen Calvo (Valencia, 1950), entitled “Y el otro lado suspira” (And the other side sighs). In it, intervened objects, photographs and images once again constitute the axis of the exhibition.

Using anonymous images taken from the past, Calvo offers us an exercise in the present and future, resolutely confronting social taboos; for the artist life continues, and that renewed message is what the spectator must discover or imagine.
The female figure, traditionally the guarantor of memory and the compiler of objects that determine the world around us, is a special protagonist in this exhibition. It was the author’s mother, a particularly observant woman, who transmitted Calvo her interest in art, and it was thanks to her that Calvo felt the need to express herself through objects.

The four series that make up this exhibition are the result of the reflection that the author carries out in all her work. We do not see this work as a simple association in the manner of the “object-trouvé”: the artist makes the objects her own after intervening them. From the anonymity of these objects, photos or engravings, other realities arise. The author studies and analyses the objects and images to the point that in many cases, with a slight intervention, the inert object or the anonymous photo become close, familiar, with a load of drama or comedy that did not exist before. In the same way that a painter uses paint, Carmen Calvo paints or sculpts with that precious material that she sometimes hoards for years until the puzzle is completed and a Carmen Calvo is born.

Carmen Calvo is currently one of the most international conceptual artists on the Spanish artistic scene. She was awarded the National Plastic Arts Prize 2013 and the Fine Arts Academic Prize of San Carlos de Valencia.
Her work can be seen in the most important national and international museums and public collections such as The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA), Fond National d’Art Contemporain. F.N.A.C. (Paris, France), Mie Prefectural Art Museum, (Tsu, Japan), Peter Stuyvesant Foundation (Amsterdam, Netherlands), MNCARS (Madrid), IVAM (Valencia) or Artium (Vitoria), among many others.