Concha Jerez.
Silences of Times

Dates: November 10, 2023 - April 28, 2024
Curator: Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
Coordinator: Alberto Figueroa
Space: East Cloister

In the last decade, four major exhibitions at leading Spanish museums and art centres—the MUSAC in León, Tabacalera in Madrid, the CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and, the most recent and ambitious in scope, the MNCARS in Madrid—have surveyed the long and prolific career of Concha Jerez (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1941), which now spans over half a century. One of our primary curatorial aims was for the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo to offer something different to the abovementioned shows, and we achieved this thanks to two decisions.

The first was to fill the galleries with works that had never been exhibited before or were only shown when the artist first unveiled them. This is especially true of the rooms that contain some of Concha Jerez’s earliest pieces, informed by her research into matter and colour, painting and sculpture. But perhaps the most important “revival” is the installation she created for the legendary Fuera de formato show (1983), only displayed on that occasion, which analysed the identity of a city square in Madrid, the Plaza de Colón, via bureaucratic paperwork pertaining to some of the buildings that frame it.

The second decision we made to set this show apart entailed inviting Concha Jerez to create new site-specific works or adapt existing pieces to the CAAC’s unique identity as both container and content. The same idea is expressed in the exhibition title’s allusion to silence and time, two concepts that permeate the building and its history and which the artist has explored at length throughout her career.

Works parade through the gardens, cloisters, courtyards and chapels, conversing with their surroundings as they touch on themes that have always characterised Concha Jerez’s oeuvre or others which this space seems to whisper in our ears. Along the straightforward or reverse itinerary that visitors can follow, there are plenty of pieces which investigate censorship and self-censorship through self-redacted or illegible writings or the game of ambiguity they both play, referenced by the show’s final work in the Chapel of Saint Bruno.

Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, curator