This first solo exhibition of the artist in F2 galería gathers every work created along the last three years. This art show is a work of reflection on different aspects of the touch in connection with the image and its origin. It is a continuation of that project developed along her stage in the Real Academia de España (Royal Academy of Spain) in Rome between 2017 and 2018.
Inma Herrera’s work analyses, deconstructs, and entangles the language of printmaking. This, full of complexities, of the weight of tradition and of the work with the body, has turned into her best ally in her purpose to establish the relationships between printmaking, sculpture and moving-image art.
The re-inauguration will take place on 30th of January, between 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
“Looking back, I see that I have always kept a peculiar relationship with my own body, and more specifically with my hands. These remind me that there is a distance, at least relative, among what I am and the outside world. Sometimes they are clumsy; other times, they turn innocent, though accurate, and at times, after years of training, they fulfill the wishes of my intellect. They are the great go-between, which allows me to interact with that space that extends beyond my body.
The presence of an engraved trace or a long set mark by time on the matter are able to unveil an appealing play of affections between two spaces, apparently isolated. Trying to understand how those numerous shapes, where a skin, surface that imprisons, yet at the same time, is a messenger, I can only immerse myself into that conversation between my actions and the field of objects and materials, which surround me. This drives me to play with a huge variety of referents that range from the most primitive and simplest gesture of recording my handprints to the representation and reinterpretation of a classical 17thcentury print, such as the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew by the Spanish artist José de Ribera.
A continual to-and-fro movement of deconstructions and dislocations. The matrix as image, as medium, as mould, copy of a copy; the image as shape, as skin, as matrix. The matrix as embodiment of all those potentials. The image as surface mediating between both familiar and unfamiliar spaces. And, ultimately, a question without a single answer about the abilities of every surface to show the paradoxical character of a printed territory, and at the same, unprintable.
The image –torn, flayed from its medium, from the body which gives it shape– challenges that network of relationships among what we see and we have not touched, among what we project and what we want to communicate through the touch”.
Inma Herrera, Helsinki, December 2020
