SC Gallery presents “Up and down: popular culture”.
Group show.
Artists: Alberto Montes, Mikel Del Río, Pablo Merchante, Sebas Velasco.
23/07/2020 – 2/10/2020
For further information or catalogue feel free to contact: scgallery@scgallery.es
Bilbao-based SC Gallery turns 12 years old, and celebrates this anniversary with the group exhibition “Up and down: popular culture”, with works from Alberto Montes (Seville, 1995), Mikel Del Río (Arrasate/Mondragón, 1988), Pablo Merchante (Seville, 1982), and Sebas Velasco (Burgos, 1988).
Pablo Merchante “LOVE, DEATH & Robots” SERIE (Tryptic)
Popular culture has traditionally been interpreted as excluded from the artistic heritage, as well as being deeply linked with the local or regional. However, there’s a remarkable difference in the low culture vs. high culture dichotomy, depending on whether it is looked at from a Modernity or Postmodernity lenses.
In the recent decades, we find a novel approach to popular culture with the massive influx of new technologies and pop aesthetics, which elevated everyday life objects into art.
This group exhibition, SC Gallery’s first after the lockdown, brings the public a collection of paintings created by Alberto Montes, Mikel Del Rio, Pablo Merchante, and Sebas Velasco.
Where “up” and “down” used to point out a geopolitical balance of power, these terms now refer to a concept that has been phased out and replaced by survival. This makes everything develop in a seemingly common space and distributed with the same level of necessity, and the essential and immediate have become the only means of subsistence.
In a moment when the global pandemic cancels any effort to understand the phenomenon of culture, this is the only valid attitude to understand this globalized world and reactivate our perception, however timidly.
We would be wrong to think that the legitimate discourse of culture is exhausted before the classic debate of low culture vs. high culture. Against the iconographic models of the elite, the imagery of the low culture barbarians imposes itself in this dystopian normality that creates an art where pretending games and the legitimate idea of copies succeed.
We cannot be subjected to an unbearable paralysis that takes us away from everything. Painting rethinks a time that, beyond masks, bring us back to the beginning of something better.
“Up and down: popular culture”, group exhibition.
Artists: Alberto Montes (Seville, 1995), Mikel Del Rio (Arrasate/Mondragón, 1988), Pablo Merchante (Seville, 1982), and Sebas Velasco (Burgos, 1988).
Sebas Velasco
Mikel del Río & Pablo Merchante
Alberto Montes
