Temporary exhibitions

2ND PROFESSIONAL ART WEEK, from 3 to 12 June

The PROFESSIONAL ART WEEK is a meeting of professionals from the sector with their most carefully curated collections. Organised by the Municipal Foundation of Culture, directed by the councillor José Luis Costillas and the gallery owner Marta Fermín, it brings together 34 artists over ten days, whose works are distributed throughout: Fábrica de Armas, the Fine Arts Museum, the Archaeological Museum, the Bar Association, the Metropolitan Seminary and the Cathedral Square. In addition to these spaces, there are also art galleries.

The Archaeological Museum of Asturias presents the exhibition "Arqueopectiva (1996-2022)" by Gonzalo García (Gijón, 1966). 

It offers a vision of material and form over the last thirty years: wood is a constant, worked the first two decades by chainsaw, axe or adze, producing large-scale abstract works on whole trunks, while in recent years the demanding techniques of traditional imagery achieve figurative and realistic works, with nods to surrealism, with the human foot being almost the sole protagonist. Another defining material that spans the three decades is the "cuchu", or cow dung, which, through processes of dehydration and amalgamation, varied its protagonism, from simple textures in wooden works, to the agglomerate of rubber and the sole component of the piece. In recent years, the irruption and improvement of polymers has led to the production of some very solid and stable works in rubber, allowing this material to follow a parallel path to wood, from abstraction to figuration, even reaching the point of duplication: works identical in shape and size in both materials. A stage, almost twenty years ago now, of fascination with the aesthetics of archaeological work, produced occasional works in sandstone. Iron shared the material protagonism during the first two decades, producing abstract geometric works. At present, resins for the production of moulds and research into the biochemical restructuring of wood with the aim of varying its properties promise to achieve, hopefully, novel techniques hitherto only within the reach of plastics.

Programme

Wednesday 8 June at 12:00, in the conference room of the Archaeological Museum of Asturias, the sculptor Gonzalo García will give a talk in which he will try to review his evolution, both stylistically and materially, as well as a brief approach to the techniques that may be of most interest.