Discovering inner and outer worlds entails an inquisitive spirit, the courage to delve into the unknown and the willingness to accept change as inevitable. To became aware of oneself and of one's surroundings, fascination and doubt must walk hand in hand, shaping the journey. Along this process, connections between people, cultures and mindsets flourish, enabling new ways of seeing and thinking. Introspection, rites of passage, symbols and travels are just a few among the many vehicles for exploration.
This year, WIN Gallery initiates a new format, combining personal and group exhibitions. For the debut of this new configuration, we propose a series of works pertaining to Gabriel Caloian, a visual artist that easily migrates from one historic register to another, from one geographic space to the rest. His style draws from ancient cultures across the globe, spanning from South America to Africa, bringing myth into modernity, deconstructing conventions – on a figurative and conceptual level – contemplating and parodying the attempts of technology to transpose eternal dreams into simplified, tangible, profane solutions.
Gabriel Caloian's personal exhibition bears the name “Zooorgic”, a word play that intersects beast and human behavior. The raw and the brutal are grafted on the ambitious, formulaic, progress seeking trend of contemporary society. There is fragmentation, isolation, hybridization of life with machine, distorted yet recognizable pieces of humans placed into a very complex and colorful, dystopian, almost cartoonish universe. It is unsettling yet it invites an analysis that is worth engaging in as we develop new tools that supplant increasingly more of the physical and intellectual activities of man.
The other sections of the gallery focus on paintings and sculptures reunited along the two themes of our recent exhibitions in Spain (Madrid and Seville): seas and flowers. This might appear as an improbable alignment of subjects but they are linked by the same desire to pursue knowledge and evolution. The seas have always fired the imagination, sense of adventure and temptation of wealth, in material and immaterial form. They have been a source for legend and mirage, a barrier and a liaison between people, lands and longings, a refuge and place of torment. This duality of the seas illustrates well the aspiration-challenge dynamic.
Flowers, the third component of this collection, are ubiquitous companions in man's trials, loves, successes and moments of grief. On one hand, fragile and ephemeral, on the other, resilient and graceful, flowers are the universal gifts of good faith. “Lady Bird” Johnson, former first lady of the USA, once said that “where flowers bloom so does hope”. Despite errors, frailties, ill-directed intentions or ignorance, flowers evoke the idea that our connections should be honored by flowers, animated by the hope that we can become better, individually and in conjunction with one another, that our deepest needs link us to civilizations past and to the ones our actions are foretelling.
