Collection: Virginia Rivas I Our World.

Virginia Rivas I Our World.
Solo Exhibition. From 23.06.2025 - 31.07.2025.
DDR Art Gallery. Calle de la Encomienda 21, 28012, Madrid (Spain).

"Every time I come home -every time- / someone there loves me/ Until then/ I stop in the accustomed and dark peace/ like any pine tree." Mary Oliver.

Our World is Virginia Rivas's new solo exhibition at DDR Art Gallery, in which she draws from the book of the same name by Mary Oliver and Molly Malone to re-examine her immediate surroundings. The exhibition reclaims lived scenes in an exercise of deconstruction to universalize her experience of the everyday. Like a logbook, she extrapolates conversations and moments that she pours onto the canvas through colors, shapes, and brief "objective" texts that, however, 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 do you plan to do with your one, wild and precious life?", Virginia Rivas envelops us in a landscape of beauty and serenity, of pain and loss, that captures our gaze and leads us to an exercise of mindfulness of what surrounds us. 

Rivas's projects permeate between the conceptual and the social, addressing the acoustics of the landscape, the psychology of color, memories, the everyday, 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 to the space on Calle Encomienda, in Madrid, on this occasion. As she herself expresses, her artistic practice is an act of memory, a poetic gesture. And Our World confirms this. Likewise, we can also observe her impetus in the tireless search within pictorial practice, with autonomous elements of meaning that already characterize her lyrical abstraction of enveloping atmospheres.

In her latest project presented at the Barjola Museum, Los espacios en blanco (The Blank Spaces), its curator Adonay Bermúdez cites "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 again, the artist places herself there, in that collective memory with the intention of constructing a landscape in which anyone can feel represented.