Activities, exhibitions and projects

From December 14, 2023, to April 26, 2024

The Casa Gerald Brenan warmly welcomes a selection of sculptures, portraits—one of them a self-portrait—and sketched drawings, some colored, by Elena Álvarez Laverón (Ceuta, 1938). These pieces have been transferred from her cosmopolitan garden, which is notably close to the Brenans’ garden, where much of the artistic material that forms the basis of her reason for being is settled in a fierce and uncontrollable process. Although peace is established after the storm, and prayer follows joy, thorny reasons are to be polished into bronze, marble, or stone, surfaces meticulously smoothed to erase the roughness of the soul. The selection of pieces on display in this exhibition has been studied and lovingly caressed, but with all the necessary precautions. They aim to symbolize, with the perseverance of a restless breath, that thorny unity of the material with the spiritual, a kind of constant oxymoron, through smooth and polished forms, magical yet forceful curves, from a creator who has always cultivated extremes: corporeal fullness that transforms into the reason for being, weightless muse, light bodies that nevertheless gain weight and volume, abstract breath on figurative imprint, a transparent syntax that transforms preliminary attempts or models into glorious expanded pieces, roughly speaking, to the universe. That is why we insist: Laverón cultivates extremes without hesitation, stretches the string, transitioning from Africanist and ethnocentric universalism—drawn from her past in Tangier with the exquisite Julio Ramis acting as an exceptional guru—to the permeable experience of the great Henry Moore or the critical or multifaceted opulence of the best Fernando Botero.

The exceptional journey of this creator—years and years manipulating matter—establishes a gaze free from prejudice, alien to canons, and her bodies, alone or intertwined, wander like bright meteors through the trail of the world and today dock in this house in Churriana, which has also seen both sides of the coin, and has experienced pleasure and suffering. Once again, the extremes.

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