SOL CALERO. GUANÁBANA

Curated by Tania Pardo.

Guanábana is the title of the exhibition that the artist Sol Calero (Caracas, 1982) is presenting at the Museo CA2M, which alludes to soursop, the sweet, heart-shaped fruit with a greenish rind that is produced in tropical places in Central and South America. The show focuses on the concept of motion and the fact of being born in one place and inhabiting another, migrating and being a migrant. And this is the artist’s life: she was born in Venezuela and lived there until she was 17 years old, when she and her family moved to Tenerife. They later spent time in Madrid and finally settled in Berlin, the city where Calero currently lives.

Her stints in different countries and her status as a Latina immigrant were the conditions leading her to develop an oeuvre focused on identity related to the exportable symbols of Latin American culture. Their formalisation in this kind of colour-drenched art and that exoticisation permeate her entire oeuvre, which is organised around several specific interests that appear constantly throughout it. This is not the first time that Sol Calero has openly drawn from her own biography, as she did in Archivos olvidados (2019), a collection of collages and paintings as a tribute to the memory of her grandmother Luisa Hernández.

The Guanábana project, Sol Calero’s first solo show to be held at a Madrid institution, brings together some of the main features of her work, like constructions of collective spaces where much of her output and her interest in architecture and design coalesce, and murals, a technique she has used since the start of her career where fried foods, vegetation and votive offerings become graphic resources and repeated symbols.

The artist starts with open interpretations and direct allusions to the figure of tourists and the idea of perspective before thinking of one place and discovering another; hence the relations established by the spectator when faced with many of her works.

The show is rounded out by other recurring features in Sol Calero’s practice, like drawing, ceramics, textiles and different found objects alluding to popular Latin American culture. The artist thus reflects on the power and ambiguity of cultural signs, clichés and the connotations that these symbols acquire in a social and political context, and how all this affects the issues of gender and identity.

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.