"I am artist and woman, surrounded by water from all parts. All this makes me cautious of drowning if I fall into the water...but yes, by chance, some time I'd like to reach the other shore. I am praying for enough energy to traverse it, because the current, by its nature, always pushes against me."

Matas’ work is a long way from the conceptual austerity and irony of artists’ performances stereotyped in the 70’s and 80’s. There is something deeply fascinating about the way she plays with elements of clothing; her observations reflecting the place of women in Mediterranean society. Matas’ work invites one to consider questions of emergence. Her work is mysterious and enigmatic, it seems to materialise from her own suffering, and that which has accumulated in the souls of women over the centuries.

In diametric opposition to a world whose everyday objects are getting lighter, smaller and flatter, against the grain of a reality that has increasingly abandoned itself to the shadowless, weightless screens of video and television, Jannis Kounellis has for the last forty years been dragging sacks of coal, sheets of iron, T-girders, rolls of lead, gas torches, fieldstones, huge wooden beams, sacks of flour, of coffee and beans, heaps of old overcoats, worn-out shoes, lumps of raw glass, open clasp knives, vast military tarpaulins, rusting camp beds, unwieldy cupboards and bronze church bells into exhibition spaces and onto theatre stages in countries all over the world.

In the context of current art history Rebecca Horn occupies a unique position. As an artist who has continuously and relentlessly braved new risks in her quest for unprecedented techniques and methods, she has, more than almost any other artist, broken the mould of artistic work with a stream of the most varied forms of expression, ranging from performance, film, mechanical sculpture and spatial composition choreographed with the precision of a ballet, to drawing, poetry and painting, as well as, most recently, stage design [1].

 

Nina Hoffman’s portraits explore the tension that emerges from the development or alteration of identity; the gulf between physical expression and hidden mental condition.

Using the contrast between overlapping graphite drawing and multiple layers of paint and wax on the same canvas she creates a strong expression of the painful collision of the universal icon with the fragile personality concealed beneath.

John Ulbricht, one of the most gifted painters in acquired culture in the world to-day, shows the head almost human in his portraits, but only the head, as the only home for homogeneousness, in order to evidence the Face of Time embodied and already personified.

An exhibition with works by Anselm Kiefer always poses a very special challenge to the observer, the curator and naturally, the collector as well. The artist’s works display such a wide variety in terms of the interpretation of the world and the depiction of the inconceivable, of the paradox, replete with illustrative metaphors and allegorical worldly landscapes that approaching and contemplating them must be understood as a provocation to knowledge itself and one’s own capacity for perception - all this within a context with an impressive dimension and an aesthetic indelibly stamped on the ob- server’s view through a symbiosis between materiality and painting. Thus, Kiefer’s work is an on-going challenge to the senses and the spirit. Yes, we recognise everything we see, yet does that mean we have already grasped it?

The words of a rebel and non-conformist who has been confronted with sudden fame at the age of 79 when his work was shown for the first time in “Kusthaus Zürich” in 2005 and celebrated at the George Pompidou Centre in a large retrospective in 2008; a fame he was never looking for and doesn’t care about at all.

Cadàver exquisit (Exquisite corpse) is a display proposal that integrates artists from t;different generations and very different styles. Exquisite corpse is a technique that allows a group of words or images to be put together as a group; the result is known as an exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French.

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