CONCHA JEREZ - BACK TO THE FUTURE – BOOTH 13 ARTISSIMA

Italy's leading contemporary art fair, ARTISSIMA, returns to the Oval in Turin from 6 to 8 November 2015.?Over 50 curators and museum directors from around the world are contributing to the fair's programme.

This year, Back to the Future, the section devoted to rediscovering the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, focuses specifically on the period 1975–85. The section will present monographic booths with works made exclusively during this decade by artists who played a key role in the history of art but whose work is not always known to the general public.

The Curatorial Committee coordinated by Eva Fabbris and integrated by João Fernandes, deputy director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofìa, Madrid; Elena Filipovic, director, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; and Beatrix Ruf, director, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, has proposed and selected high quality projects by art pioneers from all over the world in a dialogue with the latest artistic research.

Concha Jerez is one of the proposed and selected artists and she will present a solo project which will be a physical and conceptual trip through an essential period of her oeuvre addressing the topic of the mass media and revealing some of the characteristics of what it could be named as her ethics and aesthetics domain.

The career of Concha Jerez (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 1941) spans forty years of artistic work. She is part of the first generation in Spain to embrace Conceptual art in dialogue with the Fluxus movement—particularly Wolf Vostell—and the ground-breaking Spanish group ZAJ.

Since the 1970s, she has explored the field of intermedia and site-specific installation. Her work incorporates still and moving images, printed text and handwriting, speech and silence, sound and music, found or made objects, actions and performance, radio art and interactive art, as well as works specifically created for the Internet.

Jerez addresses topics of profound, social resonance from a critical perspective. Analysing the mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship, consumer society, entertainment culture, the manipulative power of the mass media in shaping how we think, the impact of advertising, the different controls exerted by political and economic power over the individual, surveillance and the sophisticated control mechanisms in developed societies or the limited scope of freedom allowed by our democratic systems.

Over the course of the past twenty years, she has also developed important, international projects in collaboration with the artist and composer José Iges.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of relevant European museums such as the Moderner Kunst Museum in Nörkoping (Sweden), Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Museum Wiesbaden, ARTIUM (Vitoria), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, Museo Casa Natal de Jovellanos, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vilafamés and MUSAC of León. She is also represented in several corporate and private collections such as La Caixa Collection, Madrid’s Regional Collection, Caja Burgos, Biblioteca Nacional, Brigitte March in Stuttgart, Schüppenhauer in Cologne, Pilar Citoler Collection and Lafuente Archive, among others.