Jenny Holzer, Raha Raissnia, Alex Reynolds

Marta Cervera Gallery is pleased to announce Jenny Holzer, Raha Raissnia y Alex Reynolds, a group exhibition by the three artists that will be open to the public from 2nd-31st July, 2020. The opening day, the gallery will remain open from 10:30 to 22:00 hrs, coinciding with the Open Day-Late Night at Doctor Fourquet Street. The show will take place at Calle Valencia 28, Madrid, until July 31st, 2020.

The photographs (I Feel You, The Rest, and The Ambiguities Of My Desires) by Jenny Holzer on display at the show, document some of the artist’s interventions in the public space. Holzer utilizes light projection to deploy texts onto architecture, outdoor scenarios and urban landscapes, playing with the reflection, image distortion on the surface of a water pond and the impression of sharpness originated in the juxtaposition of letters with a facade, wall, or a large-size fabric. These visual resources, create different projection planes (closer – further) that, with no doubt, have an affective impact on the meaning of the message. The artist employs neons and luminous structures to generate light that, once projected, merges into the city lights, creating a new visual texture of an urban postcard. It may bring to mind another form of immaterial integration, some sort of tattoo that, just like a photograph, conveys a pigment printed message. The primary role of Holzer’s synthetic texts is to interact with the spectator and to provoke their self-questioning. Far from pretending to establish a dogma or impose an idea, the artist challenges the viewer and invites everybody to play an intellectual game, full of emotional and political meanings.

The set of seven drawings by Raha Raissnia refer to different sections of a canto or a poem that maintain a dialog with each other. These drawings comprise a visual statement, a pictorial re-interpretation of a series of found slides depicting a mosque from the Sultanate period in India, currently in ruins. In "Parthenon", Raissnia takes the language used in her previous drawings to another level, by applying it to the large format. This painting was conceived in front of Retiro Park, during the artist’s residency in Madrid in 2019. Driven by a desire to break away from the conventional cinematic screen, some of Raissnia’s loop film installations are projected through semi-transparent, hanging mobile and double screens to create architectural installations that both articulate light as it moves through space and diffuse it through layers of screens and shadow. Her works relate through their process of fusing analogue with digital, the hand painted with the photographic. The architectonic forms and passages in Raissnia’s diaphanous imagery are charged with notions that relate to human history and existence.

The video by Alex Reynolds, "Nine Seconds of Black", offers the spectator the testimony of a patient as she undergoes an eye operation. A corporal experience provokes her to pose an intellectual question. How far can the human body, the human eye, go? What are its limits? Shall we consider valid the use of technology and cameras to extend the body scope? Does it change the relationship we establish with other people, with the environment? When there is light, there are these questions raised. But in the video, there are also moments of complete blindness, nine seconds of an absolute black between images. Only the digital noise reveals that there is a camera, trying to register between torches and flashlights; a search in the darkness.

By perceiving light and obscurity, the works by the three artists play the same role as the technical resources play in cinematographic creations. They act affectively in order to convey a message in a particular way, to illuminate or obscure an issue, to blur it and let the spectator envisage between shadows and lights. It allows them to highlight or “turn off” a matter that is implied to the vision itself, to technology, to the extension of a human body, etc.

Jenny Holzer was born 1950 in Gallipolis, OH, and currently lives and works in Hoosick, NY. Her works are been exhibited at the Palm Springs Art Museum, CA; Centro de Artes Visuales Helga de Alvear, Cáceres Spain; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal, Canada; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contem- porary Art, Chicago; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; MAK, Vienna, Austria; Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar, Germany; New National Ga- lerie, Berlin, Germany; Instituto Cultural Itaú, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Contemporary Arts Museum, Hous- ton; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Collection of Mort and Marlene Meyerson; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas. Awards, Leone d ́Oro, XLIV Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; Crystal Award, World Economic Forum, Geneva, Switzerland; Berlin Prize Felowship, The American in Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Urban Visionaries Award, The Cooper Union, New York; LA MOCA Award for Distinguished Women in the Arts, Los Angeles Collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggnheim Museum, New York; Tate Collection, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Min- neapolis; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Raha Raissnia (1968, Tehran, Iran) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Pratt Institute. Raissnia presented a solo exhibition of new work in 2017 at the Drawing Center (New York). In 2016, her work was the subject of a solo presentation at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). In 2015, Raissnia’s work was included in All the World's Futures, 56th International Art Exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor, Venice Biennale. Recent solo shows were held at The Drawing Center (New York), Ab/Anbar Gallery (Tehran), Galeria Marta Cervera (Madrid), Galerie Xippas (Paris), and the Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art (Isfahan, Iran). Raissnia’s projection- performances have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Kunsthal Rotterdam, Arnolfini – Center for Contemporary Arts (UK), the Drawing Center (NY), Issue Project Room (NY), and the Emily Harvey Foundation (NY), among others.

Alex Reynolds (Bilbao, 1978) studied Fine Arts in London, and later MA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. Her work explores and manipulates the codes of cinematographic language using supports such as text, video, photography and performance. She has exhibited at CA2M, Fundación Miró, MARCO, La Casa Encendida, MACBA, and Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, among others. In 2018 she received the XV ARCO Award from the Community of Madrid for Young Artists and the XXIV Edition of the Botín de Artes Plásticas 2016-2017 Scholarship. Among her latest exhibitions are "Safe, safe, safe", the pulse of the house was beating gently, in La Panera, Lleida, 2020; “Dónde estamos, donde podríamos estar”, CaixaForum Barcelona, 2020; "Monográfico" Alex Reynolds, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2019; “entre, hacia, hasta, para, por, según, sin”, EACC, Castellón, 2019, curated by Anna Manubens, 2019; "Las escenas", La Capella, Barcelona, 2019, curated by Sabel Gavaldón, Sonia Fernández Pan, Eloy Fernández Porta, David Armengol, Anna Manubens, 2019; "Te toca a ti". EEAC. Castellón, curated by Laura Vallés Vilchez, 2018; "Querer parecer noche", CA2M, Madrid, curated by Beatriz Alonso and Carlos Fernández Pello, 2018; "ITINERARIOS XXIV", Centro Botín, Santander, Spain, curated by Benjamin Weil, 2018; "Every object is a Thing but not everything is an object", Hollybush Gardens, London, 2018. She participates among her latest video programs and festivals at the FID festival in Marseille, Marseille, 2018; STUK, Leuven, Artists in Focus: Dora García + Luke Fowler + Alex Reynolds, Cinematek, Brussels, 2018. A solo exhibition on her work will be held at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, in January 2021.