"MY WINDOW"
Beny Steiner
15th December 2023 untill 15th September 2024
SCUOL - SWITZERLAND
MONDO GALERIA presents “MY WINDOW” an exhibition of limited edition photographs from the latest production by photographer Beny Steiner.
Her art career started as international model (one of the first ones travelling the world over and posing for the likes of Salvador Dalí in Barcelona). She travelled to Kabul opening her curiosity to new cultures and new experiences. Then she moved to New York in the ´80s as stylist for photographer Raymond Meier. There she met her now lifetime friend: artist Not Vital. Finally, she worked as a fashion/life style photographer herself, with a very define and personal style, publishing with the best magazines and agencies around the world.
Today, together with her cats Mr. Gucci and Prada, she lives and works in Scuol, in the Engadine valley, in Switzerland where she has her residence and her “Four Seasons Studio”.
Unfortunately, an eye sickness is deteriorating her macula since some years, consequently losing gradually her vision. Life as a photographer has become harder for her, as well as daily activities. As John Milton or Jorge Luis Borges she created her own method to cope with this reality by organising herself around a precise order in her home space to be able to navigate through it. A new way of looking at life with a focus on light and contrast, movement and stillness came together with this new reality.
These fresh experiences give her a new eye on nature, on permanency and migration, on immanence and transcendence. Her space is one, with her camera. The presence of the Piz Pisoc (the mountain in front of her house) is her way of measuring her daily existence against the passing of seasons and the mutations of Flora and Fauna. And she is ready to capture it, again and again. The appearances and disappearances in front of her delicate sight of what life has to offer, day by day, minute by minute.
In this exhibition we can see a selection of more than 50 of her photographs. Finely printed in cotton rug photo paper, opening for us a small window into her reality, a poetical vision of a particular place in a particular time, where birds become acrobats and clouds their arena.
curated by Diego Alonso y Alexeja Pozzoni (DiegoandAlexeja).
Exhibition will be open from Thursday to Sunday 12h to 19h until 15th September 2024
Beny Steiner / "Piz Pisoc 05/04/2023" - Pigment Print on Cotton Rug Paper - 60 x 40 cm
Agil Immensity by Diego Alonso
The Piz Pisoc was quiet. The curtains were of soft beautiful linen, with some elegantly exaggerated repairs. A Kafkian fly was hanging from the rod, massaging her front legs in that manner that flies do. It flew from the window to the tip of her nose. She opened slowly her eye, fluttering her lashes slowly, as if the morning light entering through the glass was burning her washed damaged iris. The other side of her childlike face was lost inside the soft warm pillow. She stood up and looked at the blue sky covered by some passing snow white clouds.
- They are back!- she thought to herself with happiness, as she photographed the rapidly playful Dohles.
The taxonomy of a routinely play between light and shadow, of a contrasted frame of an imaginary reality converted into a spatial two dimensional vortex.
Daily interaction with nature is what brings to us a flare of existence, of a particular reality. Breaking that barrier it's what unites us to our universe. A photograph becomes a prayer to universal Truth. A mirror onto the void. A symbol of a particular moment in a particular space. It connects the presence of the artist with the cosmic glance of collective subconsciousness.
A peaceful revolution through the impossible reality of the senses. The mountain, still, static, permanent as the body. And the migrating birds as lively agitated Thought, as dreaming, as inspiration.
The patient order of Cunningham's still-lifes, the spark of Ray, the composition of Avedon, shaken on a dice cup and thrown, randomly as possible, over the table to offer even destiny itself a choice of direction. Beny Steiner´s art becomes a device for us to enter her extraordinary world of magic: of beauty composed with whatever surrounds her and can take a role in her subtle storytelling.
It is in that moment, when the birds that probably inspired Alfred Hitchcock pose for her, that she enters a state of bliss. All her memories vanish for an instant. There they go, her modelling career, her posing for Salvador Dalí in Barcelona, living with Not Vital in New York, her Afghan adventures, her stylist profession, Vals and Zumthor, all that baggage that makes her vision today disappear into an eternal present for us to enjoy now finely printed on cotton rug paper and delicately framed in black wood.
As her physical vision deteriorates due to eye sickness, her spiritual visualization of the world becomes more accurate, guided by light, shadow and movement, not that of the birds but that of her soul, connected more and more to the wide spectrum of nature.
Beny Steiner / "View Room nº2 14/11/2022" - Pigment Print on Cotton Rug Paper - 60 x 40 cm
“The Space in Between“
Exhibition from 26th until 29th February 2020
Opening 28th February 2020 - 19hs
MONDO GALERIA presents for the first time in Spain "The Space in Between" an individual exhibition by Margherita Chiarva, an artist who closes with her work and career an evolutionary circle opened towards the end of the 19th century by British pioneer Anna Atkins.
The idea in her work stems from the interaction with materials and creative research. It is not a process of imitation but a process of generating a new reality embodied in silver salts. The magic of shades and textures born with the impact of light on the photosensitive material. Sometimes an image looks like one thing, other times, forms appear from the shadows or well interact with remains of reality stolen from a negative discard. But always, the unknown emerges, brings to surface a new invented reality in which who wants to see will find.
The exhibition curated by AD Studio is completed by the soundscape "Call Thou Upon My Name Unto Eternity, And It Shall Never Fail" created by Toni Castells to accompany the imagery created by Margherita Chiarva, and to elevate the space of the gallery into a sacred-spiritual escape for visitors to dive into an immersive experience.
Read more …"The Space in Between" Margherita Chiarva featuring Toni Castells
TRIBUTE TO DAVID BOWIE and 1970s ROCK LEGENDS
Gijsbert Hanekroot
From 8th June to 31st August 2019
OPENING Saturday 8th June 19.30 hs
PGA CATALUNYA RESORT - HOTEL EL CAMIRAL
"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there would be peace.." John Lennon
MONDO GALERIA in collaboration with Amante Collection present at PGA CATALUNYA RESORTS - Hotel Camiral a selection of photographs by Gijsbert Hanekroot as a tribute to David Bowie and other legends of the 1970s like Mick Jagger, John & Yoko, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry or Frank Zappa.
20 original photographs by Gijsbert Hanekroot arrive for the first time to Barcelona to depict a decade of changes and revolution through music. A time when sex, drugs and rock´n´roll were the mainstream while the post-war economic boom was coming to an end. A pivotal change in culture. The “Me” culture, as quoted by Tom Wolfe, was the beginning of a self-centred society, based on the importance of the individual as contrary to the community. It was the birth of the self-created personality, and this collection of photographs portray some of the best influencers of the 70s. in this art.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono (1971) © Gijsbert Hanekroot
Read more …TRIBUTE TO DAVID BOWIE and 1970s ROCK LEGENDS
RUSSKAYA AMERIKA
Andrea Santolaya
from 2nd to 30th JUNIE 2018
OPENING Saturday 2nd June from 12 to 22 hs
"They began a journey that continues through generations. They remain faithful to their tradition" Andrea Santolaya
MONDO GALERIA presents the latest unpublished work by Madrid born photographer Andrea Santolaya. "Russkaya Amerika", a trip to the far extremes of Alaska where she meets the last settlement of the Old Beleivers (sect separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1966). Emigrated from Russia finally settled in this corner of the world after fleeing the persecution for years through three continents (Siberia, China, Brazil, Oregon and finally Alaska)
Read more …"RUSSKAYA AMERIKA" Andrea Santolaya
BY THE RIVER OF KINGS
Jacob Aue Sobol
From 17th FEBRUARY to 30th MARCH 2018
OPENING Saturday 17th February 20hs
"The Chao Phraya River is the lifeblood of Thailand. It is born as the Ping and Nan rivers become one. From there its waters flow south to Bangkok. These pictures are a recording of what I saw and the people I met along The River of Kings in Bangkok." J.A.S
The author will be present on the opening to sign books and a portfolio review will be organized for photographers who like to Exchange with the photographer.
“By the river of Kings”. 2016. Jacob Aue Sobol.
Bangkok, Nueva York, Singapur, Madrid ...
Black and White photography has challenged the world of truth; it has defined a parallel reality beyond comprehension. We have absorbed information coming from a medium presumed to be close to real life but certainly seriously far from it, much closer to a hallucinatory realm. When have our dreams or imagination been deprived of color? When have our collective unconscious been on black and white?
Photography has been from its beginning, somewhere in the middle of 19th century, a tool to help socioeconomic development to grow on a controlled direction, taking us to what we understand today as “common… ordinary”.
“Ordinary” or “common” did not exist before we could print a presence or personality on film or paper. (not even think of image in motion). Everybody was, as a matter of being, not focused on the looks of others; of “The other”.
Nowadays we concentrate on an individuality pushed and pampered by fashion, image and aesthetics, leaving aside humanity, sensibility and love. There is where evolution from personal disappearance has brought us, pressed by technocracy and scientology (not religiously). Religion is far from it, its abandon, left behind. No rules of control or order, just business. As always has been but in a macro way (wave. Tsunami). An endless desperation for selling what nobody wants. An invented market empty of goods, empty of content.
We travel far, and we do not see the human. We travel far trying to find a difference to pumper us, that makes us feel comfortable on our shit. That creates an “Other” where it’s just light; silver and paper. Humanity is there, on the streets that are different from our streets but deeply inside are the same ones. On rivers that carry an energy that its somewhere in our veins but we don’t want to see it. In an order, that because it seems different to ours, makes us feel it as distant, but it’s really there, just next to our day by day things on the deep core of family life. Can we change that? Can we move from our convention and accept a different stream, a different source, a different river?
That’s the challenge, the purpose, the quest that we face on this work. A vision, of a world that is there, waiting for us to accept it and to acknowledge it as a part of our life.
“By the river of Kings”. 2016. Jacob Aue Sobol.
Read more …"By the river of Kings" Jacob Aue Sobol
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