Our World, Solo Exhibition by Virginia Rivas.
DDR Art Gallery Exhibition Program.
Solo Exhibition by Virginia Rivas, Our World.
25.06.2025 - 31.07.2025.
Vernissage June 24, 2025, from 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM.
“Every time I come home—every time—/ someone there loves me./ Until then/ I stop in the usual black peace/ like any pine tree.” Mary Oliver. Our World is Virginia Rivas’s new solo exhibition at DDR Art Gallery, where she draws on Mary Oliver and Molly Malon’s book of the same name to re-examine her immediate surroundings.
The exhibition salvages lived scenes in an act of deconstruction to universalize her everyday experience. As if it were a logbook, she extrapolates conversations and moments that she pours onto the canvas through colors, shapes, and brief "objective" texts that, nonetheless, possess the same abstract conception as the rest of the work. Just as Mary Oliver's poetry is characterized by conveying a message about the need to live our lives consciously and vitally:
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?", Virginia Rivas envelops us in a landscape of beauty and tranquility, of pain and loss, that captivates our gaze and leads us to an exercise of full attention to what surrounds us.
Rivas's projects permeate between the conceptual and the social, addressing the acoustics of the landscape, the psychology of color, memories, everyday life, women, and a series of themes that highlight her interest in the individual-environment nexus, which she materializes in site-specific proposals, such as the one she brings us on this occasion to the space on Encomienda street, in Madrid.
As she herself expresses, her artistic practice is an act of memory, a poetic gesture. And Our World confirms this.
Similarly, we can also observe her impetus in the tireless search within pictorial praxis, with autonomous elements of meaning that already characterize her lyrical abstraction of enveloping atmospheres. In her last project presented at the Barjola Museum,
The Blank Spaces, its curator Adonay Bermúdez quotes "Charles Taylor and his defense of personal identity as a collective dialogue, linked to the relationships and values shared among different individuals within a specific community."
And, once again, the artist places herself there, in that collective memory with the intention of constructing a landscape in which anyone can feel represented.
Our World, by Virginia Rivas.
Opening (by invitation) Tuesday, June 24, 2025.
Open to the public from June 25 to July 31, 2025.
Hours:
Open Tuesday to Friday from 12:00 PM to 7:00 PM.
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, by appointment only.