Exhibition at Ivorypress Space "Under 35"

Description of the exhibition at Ivorypress

Next 26 May, as part of PHotoEspaña’s Off festival, Ivorypress will present the group exhibition Under 35, which brings together the work of five young Spanish photographers: Laia Abril, Alberto Lizaralde, Javier Marquerie Thomas, Óscar Monzón and Jordi Ruiz Cirera.

Influenced by their own environment and conscious of the importance of their work at this moment in time, the work of these five up-and-coming artists reflects a new generation of Spanish photographers with an international presence. The lack of institutional support has led several of them to become their own managers, publishing and promoting their own work with great creative freedom, energy and eagerness, and producing, as a result, the most significant and inspiring work the genre has seen in recent years.

The overarching element of the works on show in this exhibition is the curiosity and inquisitiveness of these photographers. Laia Abril’s project The Epilogue documents the grieving process of the Robinson family after losing their daughter Cammy to bulimia. Abril reconstructs her life through family snapshots, objects and documents and offers a different point of view of bulimia, showing the different issues and conflicts Cammy struggled with thoughout her life and their effect on the indirect victims of this disease. Everything will be ok, by Alberto Lizaralde, is a reflective project produced throughout the course of five years, after an emotional breakdown. The series has a narrative structure in three acts, halfway between fiction and reality. Javier Marquerie Thomas takes a historical approach in Los Barros del Monje, in which he returns to 1937 to revisit the Battle of Brunete from his family’s country estate, where it took place. The photographs, which show a landscape bursting with ammunition and shrapnel, create a narrative in which, alongside his family, Marquerie confronts the landscape, the ammunition found in it and the stars that unite them to the soldiers in order to construct a tale about the war, despite not having lived through
it. With Karma, a project produced between 2009 and 2013, Oscar Monzón uses cars as a metaphor for humankind, studying the attitudes and behaviours of people through their cars. It’s a strong work that shows a social and aesthetic evolution motivated by the human desire to achieve the perfection of a machine. In the work The United Soya Republic, Jordi Ruiz Cirera documents, in an intersectional way, the changes in the landscape and socioeconomic fabric that the agricultural export model is producing in Paraguay, currently the world’s fourth largest soy exporter, a million-dollar transnational industry.

The selection is completed with a small display case with small-format photographs, as well as studies and sketches of the publications of the five artists included in the exhibition. Under 35 will be on display at Ivorypress until 18 July 2015.

Laia Abril (Barcelona,1986) combines her photographic work with other disciplines such as video and graphic design. She studied journalism at Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, after which she moved to New York to study at the International Center of Photography (ICP). After receiving a grant from FABRICA (Benetton’s investigation centre in Italy) she began to develop her current line of work, in which she documents the most intimate part of issues like sexuality or eating disorders, which she approaches in a way that is as delicate as it is raw. She has recently been nominated for the Foam Huf Paul, Joop Swart Masterclass and Magnum Foundation awards, and her celebrated book The Epilogue (Dewi Lewis, 2014) were short-listed for the Aperture-Paris Photo Award in 2014.

Alberto Lizaralde (Madrid, 1980) studied advertising at the Madrid’s Complutense University. He has worked as a film critic as well as directing two short films and organising various cultural events. He has also worked at the Blank Paper school of photography in Madrid as a photography teacher and digital coordinator. He currently lives in Madrid, where he combines his work as creative director at the advertising agency Havas Worldwide with his photography projects.

Javier Marquerie Thomas (Madrid, 1986) has studied photography at the University of Westminster in London and the EFTI school of photography in Madrid. Although his main medium is photography,he also uses video and performance in his work. In 2012 he won Blank Paper’s AÚPA grant and was nominated for Mack’s First Photobook Award. He currently teaches photography at Brampton College, in London.

Óscar Monzón (Málaga, 1981) has been a member of the Blank Paper collective since its inception in 2003. In 2006 he received Spain’s Ministry of Culture grant for the Photography and the Visual Arts for the Colegio de España in Paris and in 2011 he was shortlisted for PHotoEspaña’s Descubrimientos Award. His first book, Karma (RVB Books/Dalpine, 2013) received the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation award for Best Book in 2013. In 2014 he received a grant from Gd4PhotoArt to produce his latest project, an investigation about the influence of advertising.

Jordi Ruiz Cirera (Barcelona, 1984) is a documentary photographer. He studied design and worked as a graphic designer for several years before going to London to study a master’s degree in photojournalism and documentary photography at the London College of Communication, from which he graduated with honours in 2011. His work has received awards and recognition internationally with the Picture of the Year award, the Lucie International Photography Award and recently with the Taylor-Wessing Photographic Portraiture award of the National Portrait Gallery in London.