Carmela García

CARMELA GARCÍA (Lanzarote, 1964).
"Women", 2000.
Photograph.
Provenance: Important Spanish Collection.
Size: 130 x 150 cm.
As a central element of her works, in "Women" Carmela Garcia presents us with the need to rethink the world from a gender perspective which does not only imply the possibility of a different future, but also means in the first instance, a scenario of vindication around the consideration of the feminine where, in the words of the artist, it is necessary "A kind of deconstruction of what patriarchal society has established about what women are and should be, and a reconstruction of a feminist ideal of the world, where they are liberated from constraints". In this case, the powerful symbolism of the image with the iconic Barbie doll subjected to the scorching fire of a kitchen cooker directly questions the spectator in relation to the role in which women have traditionally been pigeonholed in a pejorative way, at the same time as it launches a message about the need to put an end to the dictatorship of beauty canons that are increasingly disconnected and distant from the reality of women.
Born in Lanzarote in 1964. Carmela Garcia began her studies of photography in Madrid and Barcelona, until 1998, when she began to show her work to the public. From the beginning, she has combined her social interests in photography, through literary, plastic and audiovisual references, creating an artistic corpus about the stereotyped image of women in society and the need to rethink and reformulate their role in the world. After producing series as representative as "Chicas, deseos y ficción" or "Constelación", Garcia was selected in 2005 among the hundred best Spanish photographers in the list elaborated by Exit, something that confirmed the tendency of growing importance in the works elaborated in the last years. In recent years she has been working on video works to revise various stereotyped images of women. She has become the most recognised Canarian artist of the last decade thanks to a profoundly feminist discourse, through which she represents an idealised world where men are absent and women remain outside the traditional male gaze. Her work has been shown at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (Espacio Uno), the Centro de Fotografía de Coímbra, the MUSAC in León, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno CAAM in Gran Canaria, the IVAM in Valencia, in the group exhibition El real viaje Real /The Real Royal Tryp at PS1, Contemporary Art Center at MOMA (New York) curated by Harald Szeemann,3 at the MOT Kanazawa in Japan, the University of Salamanca and the European House of Photography in Paris, among others.4567. He has exhibited at the Juana de Aizpuru galleries in Seville and Madrid, and in 2003 at the Altamira Gallery in Gijón.8910 Together with the Juana de Aizpuru gallery, he has attended international fairs such as Arco Madrid, Art Basel, Paris Photo, Frieze London, etc.