The gallery is the original space of experimentation; the first space where the gallerist creates the necessary context for the works of art to express meaning. The professional partnership between artist and gallerist becomes emotional when they agree on ways of understanding and exercising their profession, the gazes and forms we share.
These are the principles that have shaped the architectural project of Maisterravalbuena’s new space, which is the result of the history and experiences in common with the gallery’s roster of artists. The way of understanding our practice, the needs that have arisen from this fifteen-year trajectory, are the ones that gave form to the different rooms of the new gallery, while artists and works were finding their place in a program that is already thinking about the future.
Miradas y formas is the result of a joint vision of the gallerist’s profession as the promoter of sensitive knowledge, which precedes the categorization of the academy and the validation of the institution; a flexible space shared with the artists, where the creative proposal is presented without ambiguity, in connection with one collector, who participates in its ultimate construction of meaning.
Maisterravalbuena has always relied on that subjective, often agraphic, gaze inherent to its profession, which has guided the program through a territory of relevant experiences in direct dialogue with the artists. The gallery is an intermediate space, an extension of the artist’s studio, which without needing certainties, explores the formal relations of its own materiality with an intuitive gaze, connects the works through pure phenomenology and seeks to explain them in a round trip between meaning and form.
Without leaving the neighborhood, without moving hardly a block, with nearly one hundred projects completed, we have been building a space for the collector and the institution to meet at street level with the artworks and the artist. The idea of sharing, is one of the pillars of the gallery and of this exhibition, not as a one way discourse, but as an active proposal of exchange in this specific place and with a specific body, always loaded, for which we need to provide the context to produce meaning, or more precisely, to make this process a common act.
