#pedro-villar

#pedro-villar

"We're constantly striving to strike a balance between work that respects academic rules of composition, established visual codes and good readability, with something more spontaneous, adventurous, playful, even naive."

For the Escarrias-petite sisters of African descent born ten months apart in Cali, Colombia-commercial photography was in their family DNA. Their parents established a studio in their hometown that was overseen by their mother after their father's early demise. The siblings learned the family trade, and when they fled the country's civil war in 1958, they quickly reestablished the studio in Buenos Aires.

The longer we wait, the more difficult it will become to remedy the damage. Since 2019, state funding had all but dried up, forcing the foundation to auction works to raise funds to continue the restoration of both the iconic building and its many site-specific works.

The Reina Sofia's new rehang opens, quite pointedly, with a painting of a detained man sitting, head bowed and wrists shackled, as he waits for the arbitrary hand of institutional bureaucracy to decide his fate. The picture, Document No , was painted by Juan Genoves in 1975, the year Francisco Franco died and Spain began its transition to democracy after four decades of dictatorship.

Massaranduba, the small agricultural town in the south of Brazil that Pedro grew up in is far from sci-fi, but this graphic designer's imagination takes him some place else. From posters, illustration, magazine layouts and typefaces (such as pieces that focus on sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin 's fictional Kesh alphabet), Pedro works digitally with a focus on textures and grit, using dithers and fractals to build upon visual world's textures. His projects are "mood-centred", which begin by assembling references from all over to refine feelings that are conjured up by consuming films, fashion, music and other visual forms.

Some say we've gone too far, that we're going against the current, he said. But I would like to ask you, when did recognising rights become something radical? When did empathy become something exceptional? It comes days after the Socialist-led coalition government approved a decree that it said would regularise half a million people. The initiative, expected to come into effect in April, made headlines around the world for its rejection of the anti-migration policies and rhetoric seen across much of Europe and the US.

Composed of 13 panels and four canvases, and measuring 65 by 100 feet, the set was produced in 1939 for Bacchanale, a performance that Dalí called his "first paranoiac-critical ballet." It premiered at the Metropolitan Opera on November 9 of that year. The set is widely considered to be Dalí's largest painting, and its central motif contains an image of the Mount of Venus.

From figures with multiple legs and noodles for arms to frolicking trees, Paco Pomet summons the absurd. Known for his uncanny oil paintings rendered mostly in monochrome and enlivened by colorful details of overly stretchy limbs or celestial objects, a sense of nostalgia greets surreal scenarios. The artist often derives his imagery from vintage black-and-white photographs, adding an absurd dimension to history.

An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.

MADRID - The most famous portrait of Maruja Mallo depicts the artist covered from head to toe in seaweed. She is crowned and draped with long, rope-like strands of kelp, her arms raised triumphantly like an all-powerful marine goddess. This unconventional photograph, snapped in 1945 by the poet Pablo Neruda on a Chilean beach, was no doubt carefully orchestrated by the Spanish artist, who viewed herself as an extension of her unique work, where female energy is a conduit for natural and even cosmic forces.

For Derrick Guild, portraits of the likes of the Infanta and the Spanish royal family, such as Velázquez's seminal" Las Meninas," provide the starting point for a painting practice that examines social status, mores, and expectations. Through 17th- and 18th-century portraits, Guild examines art as a vehicle for social and diplomatic relations, considering how painting was used to impart very specific messages and emphasize prestige.

I was intrigued by the similarity between two paintings recently featured in the Guardian: the Ecce Homo as restored by Cecilia Gimenez (Cecilia Gimenez, famed for Monkey Christ' mural mishap, dies at 94, 30 December) and Tete de Femme by Pablo Picasso (1m Picasso portrait up for grabs for 100 in charity raffle, 31 December). Perhaps Cecilia's work is in need of a reappraisal. Steve Shearsmith Beverley, East Yorkshire

OSCAR MURILLO (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) has developed a multifaceted and challenging practice that spans painting, collaborative projects, video, sound and installation. Through each body of work, the artist probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, demonstrating a commitment to the power of material presence alongside complex meditations on contemporary society. A focus on the social dimension that sits on the border between performance and events is also central to Murillo's practice.

The artist is known for his absurdist paintings of animals with overly long legs, contorted bodies, or myriad mutant-like heads or limbs. They're often set amid woodlands or meadows evocative of 18th- and 19th-century academic landscape paintings or depictions of formal hunts. Instead, both domesticated and wild animals graze as normally as they would without dozens of heads or udders attached in unnatural places around their bodies.

The artists José Parlá and Claudia Hilda, his wife, live in a former fire station in Fort Greene surrounded by memories of Cuba, which Parlá's ­family fled in 1970 and where ­Hilda lived until recently. "There's a lot of magical realism here, a big mix of Cuban traditions and religion," says Parlá, pointing to an icon of la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint, in the kitchen. "We cannot move her!"

Regina Silveira has spent the better part of three decades considering the relationship between media and meaning, particularly as it relates to Latin America. First presented in 1997, "To Be Continued..." features 100 black-and-white reproductions of photos, newspaper clippings, propaganda, advertisements, and more. Silveira nests each image into an oversized puzzle piece, which cuts off faces and scenes to leave fragments of pop culture icons, flora and fauna, and even the occasional mugshot spliced next to one another.

- Outsider Art Fair has announced 68 exhibitors for its 34th edition at Manhattan's Metropolitan Pavilion this March 19-22. First-timers include Gagné Contemporary (Toronto), Embajada (San Juan), and Nanjing Outsider Art Center. - A long-lost Renaissance portrait has resurfaced at the Winter Show at New York's Park Avenue Armory. The portrait of a preacher by Sofonisba Anguissola can be found on the booth of Old Master dealer Robert Simon. ( Artnet News)

Taking over the colourful Casa Gilardi, Luis Barragán's last commissioned residence, built for the advertising executive Francisco Gilardi in the mid-1970s, the German artist Gregor Hildebrandt transforms the house's stylish rooms with an ever-expanding exhibition of his enigmatic works across various media. Known for transforming outmoded analogue recording media-including audio cassettes, VHS tapes and vinyl records-into paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations, the Berlin-based artist's conceptual works explore themes of memory, nostalgia and the physical representation of intangible sound and sight.

The artists José Parlá and Claudia Hilda, his wife, live in a former fire station in Fort Greene surrounded by memories of Cuba, which Parlá's family fled in 1970 and where Hilda lived until recently. "There's a lot of magical realism here, a big mix of Cuban traditions and religion," says Parlá, pointing to an icon of la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint, in the kitchen. "We cannot move her!"

Digital by Nature: The Art of Miguel Chevalier at Kunsthalle München presents the artist's largest solo exhibition in Europe to date, curated by Franziska Stöhr. The exhibition surveys Miguel Chevalier's practice from the early 1980s to the present, tracing his sustained engagement with digital technologies as both tools and subjects of artistic inquiry. Born in 1959 in Mexico City and based in Paris, Chevalier has worked with computers as a creative medium for more than four decades.

One recent weekday morning, the British painter Peter Doig arrived at a bonded warehouse-a cavernous brick building-about a mile south of the River Thames, but not subject to the import taxes of the United Kingdom. He buzzed through security and entered a windowless white room, where he settled in for a long day. Awaiting him were a series of etching prints that had been brought over from the United States to be signed by Doig before being put up for sale.

I don't want to be Botero or only a lady who paints,

"The four large-scale canvases that constitute the core of ' Misfits' maintain the fundamental elements of the artist's visual lexicon while radically reconfiguring compositional structure and spatial organization. These works advance a design freedom that is simultaneously forceful and controlled, achieving a balance between expressive intensity and formal restraint. As such, the series marks a decisive moment in Nuñez artistic evolution and possibly an initial step toward a more profound and transformative reorientation of his practice."