13 Sep 2009

Light years. Cristina Lucas at CA2M Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid

CA2M, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, is pleased to present the solo exhibition 'Light Years. Cristina Lucas', the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date. This exhibition concentrates on her recent work, putting into dialogue drawings, photographs, videos and installations where the artist herself, other people, theatre actors or even live animals orchestrate performative acts that confront the symbols, myths and metaphors of the foundations of western patriarchal dominance. The use of satire within Lucas's practice produces a moral ambivalence, which unsettles any fixation on a historical victimization of women, concerning their social visibility and mobility in the public sphere. Nonetheless the criticality in her work can be found precisely in the stereotypical, literal representation and overexposure of the significance of signs in both misogynist traditions and feminism's own agendas and contested genealogy.

The new comissions on view include La Liberté Raisonné, a video that coments on the inherent contradiction that can be found in Delacroix’s 1830 painting La Liberté guidant le peuple, in which one finds the petrification of a woman as a female allegory that represents liberty; and Light Years, a luminous cartographic installation that gave the name to the exhibition, which chronologically visualizes a sort of pandemia of democracy in a global adoption of universal suffrage and its various forms of geopolitical appropriation. These works are shown next to a  selection of Lucas’s previous pieces, among which are Habla (2008), You can walk too (2007), Las hijas de Eva (2008), Rousseau & Sophie (2007) and the watercolor drawing series Sección Femenina: Anuario 1956 (2003), based on illustrations originally printed in an issue of a women’s magazine produced by the fascist Falange Española.

Cristina Lucas (Jaén, Spain 1973) lives and works in Madrid and Amsterdam. She is a former resident of the Rijksakademie and received her BFA from both the Universidad Complutence de Madrid and the University of California, Irvine. Her work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including (selection): 10th Bienal de la Havana, Havana, 2009; 28th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo 2008; Eurasia. Geographic cross-overs in art MART, Rovereto, 2008; The Furious Gaze, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria, 2008; 10 th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul 2007; and the 1st Singapore Biennale, 2006. She has had solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum of Schiedam, the Netherlands and at Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid. Her work can be found in museum collections such as Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Kiasma, Helsinki and MUSAC, Leon.

Light years. Cristina Lucas is curated by Inti Guerrero. The exhibition will travel to Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City and is accompanied by a bilingual publication.


CA2M, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo is a dynamic arts venue devoted to cutting-edge art. It is home to the Contemporary Art Collection of the Regional Government of Madrid, which comprises more than 1,500 works. At the same time, it organizes an ambitious programme of exhibitions, mediation and research, designed to earn it a place among the most advanced arts centres in Europe. Among the fundamental issues that the centre aims to address are the study of the meaning of art in modern-day culture and society; the political effectiveness of art and culture; the alternatives to traditional work models in art; the analysis of the institution art as a perpetuator of symbolic and economic power relations; concepts related to life in community and, specifically, the role of the periphery of large cities.

www.madrid.org/centrodeartedosdemayo