Relatos extraordinarios exhibition, by artists Laylah Ali and Abigail Lazkoz, was inaugurated last Thursday, at Parpallo Hall, Valencia Council.
Ali and Lazkoz share pictorial technique as way of expression, specifically drawing. They also have in common the strategy of “telling” different stories through their artworks, with sophisticated irony. Abigail Lazkoz relates her stories while Laylah Ali draws on paper with ink and pencil. Her drawings might seem to be product of fiction at first sight, though there is a political message in each of them, committed to the conditioning environment.
The exhibition, commissioned by Johanna Caplliure and Rian Lozano, has been structured as a dialogue between both poetics, and will be completed with a publication in which one short story written by A. Moreno Prieto interacts with Ali and Lazkoz’s work. Besides, a program of Extraordinary Conversations with different professionals (Antonia Cabanilles, Anna Pahissa, Pilar Pedraza and Nicolas Sanchez Dura) will be held, for varied viewers, in the same exhibition space in October.
Laylah Ali (Buffalo, New York, 1968) works and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Graduated in Fine Arts at Williams College, she got a master’s degree on Fine Arts at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Her works reflect the emotional tension of violence in power social relations, and the political resistance through her ambiguous characters. Her artworks have been showcased at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others. Relatos extraordinarios premieres her work in Spain.
Abigail Lazkoz (Bilbao, Basque Country, 1972) graduated in Fine Arts at Leioa Fine Arts Faculty, UPV/EHU, where she got her PhD at Painting Department. Heir to baroque tenebrism, romantic sinister and expressionism of artists linked to historical avant-gardes, Lazkoz shares, furthermore, the expressiveness of Japanese and Mexican engravers without forgetting other contemporary references such as Tim Burton’s movies or Charles Burns’ illustrations. She presently lives and works in New York.
Parpallo Hall in Valencia was inaugurated in 1980, becoming one of the first spaces for contemporary art at the Spanish scene. Relatos extraordinarios will be open to the public through November 13.
Parpallo Hall
La Beneficencia Cultural Center
Corona 36th street, Valencia
Sources: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SALA-PARPALL%C3%93/145093262247529/ http://www.salaparpallo.es/
