Maisterravalbuena is pleased to present ‘Sydney would have nothing to hide if others did not have anything to fear’, the second solo exhibition of Daniel Jacoby in our gallery.
There is a shop in the heart of one of the most commercial streets in Lima where they sell cotton clothes similar those sold in other local shops. However, despite its obvious commercial prosperity, in this shop they have decided to continue displaying clothes the humble and traditional small-trader way. Accordingly, they stretch them and pin them up on the walls, creating some kind of tapestry all over the shop. This way, they take the most out of every millimeter of the garments and highlight their textile quality.
Doing without dummies or pictures of exuberant models, the company puts every garment in the limelight, straying from the contemporary body-cult display standards. They democratize the display of clothes, keeping a timeless code.
The shop has been named after its owner’s admiration, almost obsession, for an Australian city in the geographic and socioeconomic antipodes of the capital of Peru: Sydney.
The new pieces of the series Sydney presented in the gallery take us through different modules, going from Meccano-like structures to a shop window. The artist creates flat shapes following the geometrical patterns of the clothes, thus obtaining abstract sculptures hiding subtle anthropomorphic vestiges. By means of different dim-light atmospheres, an enigmatic universe opens up, placing us in the position of flâneurs, walking around a circuit made up of led lights and module structures.
In the imagined world constructed by this project, Sydney is the name of a fiction character that embodies a successful businessman of the Peruvian textile industry, along with his glories and failures. With each new creation, a new episode on this biography is completed, narrated as a fable by its title.
Daniel Jacoby (Lima, 1985) has exhibited his works in the EYE Film Institut, Amsterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Goethe Institut, Brazil; SESC videobrasil, Sao Paulo; Luxembourg Casino, Luxemburg; Kunsthalf Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Trafó, Budapest; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Les Rencontres Internationales, Paris; Cuenca 11th Biennial, Ecuador.
His works can be found in public collections such as: CA2M Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid; FRAC Île-de-France, Paris; Centre d’Art La Panera, Lleida; Cajasol Foundation, Sevilla, among others.
He has recently taken part with Maisterravalbuena in Art Basel 2016 with the project Sydney Went Looking for the Strangest Animal in the Jungle but Found the Rain Instead.
