- Artist:
- Susy Gómez
- Date:
- 2000
- Technique:
- Result of the action of intervening on a printed image with mixed technique and enlarging it photographically. Photograph on aluminium and a wooden frame
- Dimensions:
- 240 x 180 x 4,5 cm
- Origin:
- Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma, Ajuntament de Palma collection long-term loan
- Registration number:
- 405
Since the 1990s Susy Gómez has worked on images taken from fashion magazines, intervening on them characteristically, and one of the more outstanding ones is Untitled no. 94 (2000). Her interest in fashion magazines arose from a connection with her childhood, when she would glance at the magazines the cosmopolitan guests of the hotel belonging to her parents – located in Cala de Sant Vincenç (Pollença, Mallorca), a setting that has become a place of reference for her creation – used to bring from Europe and the United States.
Her work, which revolves around her autobiography, repeatedly focusses on her own personal history or immediate surroundings, going back to the foundations of her life. She methodologically selects the images and intervenes on them by applying other elements such as paint or wax; afterwards she reproduces them photographically and enlarges the image into big formats, thus changing the sense of their presence with her process. Women, presented as objects surrounded by luxury, are humanized, bestowing character and individuality on them.
E.B.
Susy Gómez is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Palma de Mallorca. She began her training in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona, the city where she settled and found the right atmosphere for developing her creative ability. In the early 1990s she began holding her first exhibitions, standing out as one of the most promising artists of the period.
Using different media – sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, video and performance – this Mallorcan artist develops autobiographical work in which everyday objects become metaphors: dresses, hearts, eyes, houses, flowers, boats, butterflies, chairs… Her work has mainly been constructed on the basis of a reflection on identity with a desire to explore the intersection between art and spirituality, social action and individual identity, appealing to the position occupied by the subject in the contemporary world.
For Susy Gómez questioning the present, destiny, the meaning of life and spiritual ties from multiple ambiances becomes an unavoidable, vital necessity which leads her to reflect on realisation, decoding the different relationships established between the subject and the context he or she is immersed in. This demonstrates a will to show that there is no one way of identifying things, but many.
On a conceptual level her universe not only calls for a spiritual attitude from spectators, but also demands a voiding of beliefs, dematerialization of the ego, personal history, responsibility for our own thoughts, feelings and actions, and invites spectators to transcend the social mask and discover their identity and the place they occupy in the collective and individual conscience.
Exhibitions of her work have been held at Espai 13, Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1993), Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca (1996), Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain-Nice (France, 1999), Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Centre del Carme (Valencia, 2000), Esglèsia del Convent, Museu de Pollença, (Mallorca, 2001), the Council of the European Union in Brussels, Justus Lipsius Building (Brussels, 2002), Museo de Navarra (Pamplona, 2004) and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (2009). She has also created installations for public spaces like the one produced in Puerta de Alcalá (Madrid, 2002) in collaboration with the company Carolina Herrera, and performances such as Hogar, dulce hogar for the Nit Niu in Cala de Sant Vicenç (Pollença, Mallorca, 2001).
Her work forms part of the following collections belonging to national and international entities and art centres: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Artium de Álava (Vitoria), Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia), Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Murugami Hirai Museum, (Tokyo), Col·lecció Testimoni, Fundació “la Caixa” (Barcelona), Collection L’Oreal, Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain-Nice, among others.
E.B.
