MARRIA PRATTS: SOME WIZARDS IN SAVILE ROW
Carl Kostyál presents an exhibition by Catalan artist Marria Pratts. Ghosts, mice and melting clocks are just some of the familiar tropes in her painterly arsenal that appear in these monumental paintings.
March 22 – April 20, 2024
Defiance, autonomy, resilience, invention, the creative negotiation of the world’s light and dark elements in response to one’s immediate surroundings in ways that layer art and move it beyond mere objects and situations… these are the things that make art turn fructuous, fertile, even feral, whether in Brooklyn, Bern or Barcelona.
Like Pensato’s now demolished Bushwick studio and Francis Bacon’s disheveled Reese Mews hive in London—it was famously transported across the English Channel, spent smokes and all, to The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin in 1998—Pratts’ well-known working digs provide great insight into her multiple practices and evolving artistic persona. Located on the outskirts of Barcelona in the industrial working class neighbourhood of L´Hospitalet de Llobregat, her massive live-work space has been redesigned to represent, in the words of one writer, a flourishing view of what goes on inside the artist’s head.
For someone who has lived precariously, she naturally cultivated a sustained interest in the B-side of her city’s urban fabric (“I feel an aesthetic attraction to stuff most people ignore,” Pratts says; “I’m inspired as much by walks in my neighbourhood, as I am by flowers growing out of the cement, abandoned tires, paint on asphalt, etc.”). She embraced the possibilities connected to ephemeral gestures performed at a monumental scale.
“For me, conceptual art feels like it is trapped in museums,” Pratts says, distinguishing herself from generations of Spanish artists who eschew two-dimensional work on canvas, “Painting, on the other hand, is invested with magical and radical power.”
Once installed there, she transformed the canvas once more by pushing the limits of what is possible, at least institutionally. Having titled the exhibition Apunts per a un incendi dels ulls, or “Notes for Setting Your Eyes On Fire,” MACBA proffered an invitation for Pratts to intervene inside their walls. This the Catalan artist did by activating a signature element of her studio practice—the burning of specific sections of canvases—inside the museum’s galleries.
When I concurred, she delivered herself of a comment worthy of other creative dynamos, but with a generosity that brought me back to Pensato and her unruly defiance, which I now understand to be an expansive embrace: “To that I would add that painting is also like a ceremony, an age-old one that goes back millennia. For me, at least, it’s like a ceremony where I get to also say ‘Everybody’s welcome.’”