Maps of Otherness

Irene Dubrovsky

An exhibition catalogue from Irene Dubrovsky’s solo exhibition, Maps of Otherness, displayed in the Mexican Cultural Institute in Vienna, Egypt’s Palace in Lisbon and Pere Prune Art Center in Barcelona. Including text by Octavio Avendaño Trujillo, curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Mexico:

“What is the power or importance of seeing a map through an artist’s impression? It is the power to recognize ourselves as human beings, to recognize otherness as a unifying force, not as a source of anxiety. At least, that is what is shown in Irene Dubrovsky’s work, which has managed to weave a suggestive relationship between seeing the image, the reality and meaning of art and the world.

Taking as her starting point formal and technological elements like the Google Earth platform or maps of airline routes, the artist achieves an elective duality which leads to a spiritual and rational state, allowing us to recreate incomplete visions to understand the spirit and the revealed form of the aesthetic experience. Irene Dubrovsky’s works generate optical and three-dimensional illusions which are mathematically brilliant and aesthetically troubling. This makes it impossible to classify the works as paintings, objects d’art, tapestries, collages or drawings; they can only be understood as a glorious manifestation of contemporary art.

At the same time, using ancestral materials such as acrylic paint, wood, cloth and handmade paper, the works poetically display the mark of the natural and artificial configuration of the planet we inhabit. They recreate the abstract and architectural possibilities that mold a landscape which can be rediscovered by the viewer, a space which is devastated by the crisis of capitalism and the grand geopolitical utopias. These maps force us to question our contemporariness. In this way Dubrovsky claims the information, such as the airline routes, then denounces and demonstrates the fact that the South is no longer a geographical category but rather a condition of the community, she graphically highlights the zones of the planet where communication by air with the rest of the world does not exist, with because these zones have been conserved as a natural oasis or because they have been scorned by the great world of economies.

Without a doubt, the work of Irene Dubrovsky is like a great cloth which enfolds and binds the transformation itself into the viewer’s invention, the invention of the other, reminding us that through art we can be better human beings.”

Irene Dubrovsky, Maps of Otherness, exhibition catalogue, Conaculta Fonca, Lisbon, 2014

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