Carmen Calvo
Valencia, Spain, 1950.
The drawings, collages, interventions on different objects and photographs by Carmen Calvo (Valencia, 1950) reveal one of the Spanish artists with the most determination in dealing with social taboos, creating hurtful, sarcastic and humorous images.
From the harrowing world of Surrealism, according to Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Calvo deliberately chose the darkest areas, those that seem to allude to the disruption of memory. She shares with Duchamp a certain passion for the arbitrary arrangement of objects, for the explicit silence of the readymade, a fondness for unconventional readings of things, for the eye that looks through the horrible keyhole”.
Her long career as an artist and her commitment, unequivocally experimental, make up one of the most representative proposals of the Spanish Contemporary Art. In 2013 she was awarded the Spanish National Fine Arts Prize by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport because of the hybrid nature of her creations and the diversity of materials and techniques present in her work.
Her work can be seen in the most important museums and public collections as MNCARS (Madrid, Spain), IVAM (Valencia, Spain), Artium (Vitoria, Spain), Fond National d’Art Contemporain, F.N.A.C. (Paris, France), Mie Prefectural Art Museum, (Tsu, Japan) or Peter Stuyvesant Foundation (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), among others.