The ninth ONCE Foundation International Art Biennial dives into mental health

Madrid,

About to reach its twentieth anniversary, the ONCE Foundation International Art Biennial continues to present in Madrid proposals by artists with disabilities or who have created works related to said theme with the aim of making these authors known and promoting their participation in the market. artistic, in addition to demanding the end of prejudices and the urgency of the full participation of all individuals in cultural life.

The motto of the ninth edition of this initiative is “Paths of resilience: the transformation of mental health through contemporary art”, as it has focused on experimentation with the possibilities of creation, in its different disciplines, to manifest the challenges involved in ensuring mental health in today’s society, facing the growing phenomenon of unwanted loneliness and contributing to breaking down stigmas. As important as the exhibition, the axis of the Biennial and already open in CentroCentro, are, for this reason, the educational activities that accompany it, always free, intended for everyone and designed to provide self-learning tools for the interpretation of recent art and encourage awareness and understanding of diversity.

Under the curatorship of Mercè Luz Arqué, who has coordinated the previous eight editions of the exhibition, seventy pieces by more than forty creators have been brought together in Cibeles, coming from both their private collections and galleries and museums; Of them, more than half have some disability. The list deserves a lot of attention: María Álvarez, Ascanio Cuba, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Bellows, Louise Bourgeois, Alejandra Caballero, Carla Cabanas, Jorge Alberto Cadi, Carmen Calvo, Misleidys Castillo, José Cobo, Aloïse Corbaz, Filip Custic, Salvador Dalí , Henry Darger, Ángela de la Cruz, Félix Fernández, Sebastián Ferreira, Irene Garher, Edward Hopper, Alex Hug, Karman Verdi, Yayoi Kusama, Wences Lamas, Jean Paul León Yodh, Berta López, Ramón Losa, Cristina Lucas, Echo Mc Callister , Dan Miller, Donald Mitchel, Juan Muñoz Munimara, Paloma Navares, Carme Ollé, Antònia Ripoll, Jai Rius, Alberto Ros, Noé Sendas, Cindy Sherman, Cuco Suárez, Andy Warhol, Adolf Wölfli and Zush.

It is worth highlighting the contexts in which many of them have worked: the Swiss Wölfli did not begin to draw until he was thirty-five, when he was a patient at the Waldau psychiatric hospital, and decided to reinvent himself, from art, literature and music , his life and the world (his fictional autobiography was 3,000 pages long and was called From the cradle to the Grave); Alberto Ros is a self-taught photographer who, with an evident desire for constant experimentation, has specialized in equirectangular and wet collodion photography; Alejandra Caballero is one of the current painters who has portrayed domestic loneliness the most and best, especially female loneliness; and Alex Hug has created living sculptures intended to make us reflect both on wars and on mental health. At the same time, it claims the possibility of finding messages in fabrics beyond their functionality.

Alexandra. Gentleman. Unsent letter, 2024

Aloïse Corbaz’s drawings, for their part, are evidently linked to her schizophrenia and, most likely, allowed her to progress in her illness and overcome her hospitalization: she worked on both sides, occupying all the available space and articulating a world populated with figures humans, animals, flowers and fruits. Warhol, as is known, went ahead by underlining the power in contemporary society of mass media, celebrities and parallel realities before virtual ones; Ángela de la Cruz has transferred references to her own body, vulnerable after a stroke, to her work, transmitting emotions through color; Antònia Ripoll contrasts individual sensibilities and generalized forms of control in paintings, drawings, engravings and assemblages; and Ascanio Cuba highlights the hope and inspiration underlying every creative process.

Berta López records what she does not want to forget when her memory begins to fail her; Carla Cabanas also alludes to memory, both collective and cultural; Carme Ollé photographs fragments of landscapes that can go unnoticed even by those who live there; Carmen Calvo intervenes objects to confront social taboos; Cindy Sherman has time and time again used herself to address the roles of women and the artist; Cristina Lucas confronts the dilemmas between personal and official stories; and Cuco Suárez brings issues related to the exploitation of human beings and marginality to his installations and performances.

Dan Miller, who was diagnosed with autism, has focused his drawings on language; Donald Mitchell covered his images with fields of lines to later reveal the faces and shapes he had buried; Echo McCallister is the author of splendid compositions with vivid landscapes full of fantastic beings, to which he added new techniques and materials after his admission to the Spenser State Hospital; and Hopper, as is known, captured the loneliness of the contemporary individual by letting his taciturn character influence his painting.

Félix Fernández advances in his personal healing through photography, confessing that educating himself is like accumulating magic in his pockets; Filip Custic also works in photography, performance and video to refer to identity, the body and our relationship with technology; George Bellows combined art and sport in his production, to which he also dedicated himself; Henry Darger, like Wölfli, wrote a very extensive autobiography and an even more extensive work of fiction: In the Realms of the Unreal; Irene Garher is the author of portraits, landscapes and photos around dance and the performing arts; Jai Rius brings dreamism to his sculptures; Jean Paul León Yodh promotes understanding between religions and the end of violence against women and migrants in his paintings, sculptures and texts; and Basquiat endured his difficult life through his bold street-based painting.

Jorge Cadi, a schizophrenia patient, continually searches for materials for his works (collages, drawings, ceramics) among abandoned objects in the city; Karman Verdi combines introspection and social anthropology in his photos; Louise Bourgeois made her complex family relationships the starting point of her multiform works, about wounds to heal and conflicts that drag on; María Álvarez Pisano, a nurse focused on humanitarian action, also cultivates experimental analog photography; Misleidys Castillo Pedroso expresses herself solely, due to her hearing disability, through her creations, drawings of bodybuilders with brown tape around their contours; Noé Sendas works in his installations with the notion of suspended time, with strangeness in perception and the borders between what is real and what is dreamed; Paloma Navares often challenges the limits of logic to explore her ties to emotions; Ramón Losa has sought to represent in his drawings the experience of men, sick people and artists who do not feel like such and Dalí… brought to his art, in his words, his “love for everything that is golden and excessive, his passion for luxury and his love for oriental fashion.”

Finally, Wences Lamas does not conceive his work without a visceral spirituality; Yayoi Kusama, an intern in a sanatorium for decades, has created unique psychedelic environments in which it is possible to conjure fears; and Zush, artist, scientist and mystic, shaped his own state, with its flag, seals and paper money. All your worlds are in this and on our side.