SOL CALERO. BUSCANDO GUANÁBANA ANDO YO

Curated by Tania Pardo.

Artist Sol Calero (Caracas, Venezuela, 1982) presents her solo exhibition Buscando guanábana ando yo (Busy Looking for Soursops). The title is inspired by the popular Rubén Blades song ‘Buscando guayaba ando yo’. In this project, soursops – a fruit native to Central America and the Caribbean – symbolise the search for essentials: identity, a sense of belonging, the meaning of home. The exhibition explores concepts related to movement and displacement, materialised in large-scale installations comprising murals, paintings and sculptures that attempt to recreate the experiences of migrants, or the circumstance of having been born in one place and living in another. This is true of our artist, who was born in Venezuela and lived there until she was seventeen, when she and her family moved to Tenerife. After a sojourn in Madrid, she settled in Berlin, where she lives today. Her time in different countries and her trajectory as a Latin American immigrant both proved significant to the development of her work, which focuses on issues of identity in connection with symbols of Latin American culture.

Buscando guanábana ando yo is the first solo exhibition devoted to Sol Calero at an art centre in Madrid and brings together some of her oeuvre’s central themes and formats. These include the building of collective spaces, which make up a large portion of Calero’s output and draw on her interest in architecture and design. Mural painting, a technique she has used since the beginning of her career to transform fruit and vegetation into graphic and symbolic elements characterised by a play of untold colours, as well as ex-votos, sculptures that include references to folklore and popular beliefs are also heavily featured. For this exhibition, the artist has created a version of the installation El Autobús. The installation was first shown at Tate Liverpool in 2019 and subsequently at Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in 2022, and now forms the starting point of the exhibition itinerary at Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. In Calero’s audio-visual installation, visitors are invited on a journey across fictional worlds, challenging conventions related to travel and leisure activities. This way she reconsiders the figure of the tourist and the discrepancy between the idealised perception of a place and the reality discovered upon closer examination. Latin American art is often perceived as a homogeneous entity, reduced to a simplified vision of a specific region. Calero uses this perspective to call cultural stereotypes into question, both in and outside of Latin American countries, revealing how expectations may differ from lived experience.

The exhibition also includes the artist’s Milagritos sculptures, which are part of her Pica-Pica project, originally exhibited at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, as well as the soap opera titled Desde el jardín, screened for the first time at David Dale Gallery, along with various paintings from different installations evoking the Latin American symbols that represent the artist’s origins and act as vehicles transporting us from inside to outside, engaging visitors throughout the exhibition.

These symbolic references to Latin American tradition enable Calero to reflect on power and the ambiguity of cultural signs, as well as the clichés and connotations that these symbols acquire in different social and political contexts, influencing issues such as gender and identity. This is the first appearance of soursops in Calero’s oeuvre. The fruit symbolises her trajectory, an ongoing search depicted for the first time in the paintings on view in the show. These works invite visitors into the process of building new places, where an aesthetics of displacement emerges from the transformation of everyday elements to shape a new reality.

SOL CALERO 

Sol Calero was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1982 and has been living and working in Berlin since 2009. The colourful environments she creates merge painting practice expanded with the vernacular architecture and cultural codes of Latin America and its diaspora. Her immersive, participatory installations have often taken the form of small businesses, like a hair salon, a currency exchange window, a salsa school, a travel agency or a restaurant, in order to question aesthetic hierarchies and challenge the perception of the exotic while interacting with local contexts. Combining materials and media, including furniture, textiles, mosaics, video, murals and functional found objects, her projects explore the illusion of the Caribbean as a paradise, disarming the spectator with a friendly, fun atmosphere while using a cross-cutting visual language to engage in conversations about migration, displacement and identity.

Her recent exhibitions include: Francesca Minini, Milan (2023); Stavanger Art Museum, Norway (2023); 1646, The Hague (2022); Crèvecœur, Paris (2021); Copenhagen Contemporary (2020); Villa Arson, Nice (2020); Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2019); Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (2019); and ChertLüdde, Berlin (2019). She has recently participated in the following group exhibitions: the Venice Biennale, ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, curated by Adriano Pedrosa (2024); Oku-Noto Triennale, Japan (2023); Bergen Assembly, Norway (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (2020); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2019); and Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2019). Calero was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2017, which included an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin. She also co-directs a project space in Berlin with Christopher Kline called Kinderhook & Caracas.

TANIA PARDO

(Madrid, 1976) She is the director of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of the Community of Madrid. Until July 2019, she was a Community of Madrid Fine Arts Consultant, and before that she was in charge of the Exhibitions Department at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. She has also served as a curator at MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, and the head of the programming at the Laboratorio 987 space. She has been the director of projects at the Fundación Santander 2016 (2009-2010) and an associate professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She recently curated the Cristina Garrido show The Origin of Forms at the Museo CA2M and Machine Dream Bird by Teresa Solar Abboud along with Claudia Segura, in a co-production with the MACBA and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.