Galerie Kitsuné | Exhibition calendar – on view | Maru Quiñonero

MARCH 2 - APRIL 2

Reir y Bailar, an exhibition by Maru Quiñonero

Galerie Kitsuné is pleased to present ‘Reir y Bailar’, an exhibition by Maru Quiñonero, a Madrid based-artist born in Spain in 1979.

Maru Quiñonero takes notes daily; random words, phrases or ideas that later help herself shape her own creative thinking. Journalist Almudena Ávalos, a personal friend of Maru, is the one who puts this simple idea in the artist’s mind. And it remains there, latent, until she manages to give it a pictorial form. This exhibition displays 21 works that develop a personal vision, a conceptual exercise, on color. A unique search that Maru always pursues through the pencil stroke on paper, her hallmarks.

‘I often defend the theory that inspiration is everywhere, mainly, in the little things. It comes from tiny daily details that fill my routine; in my studio, at home, on a walk, in a conversation. Abstraction also represents the reality that surrounds us. Not figuratively, but it keeps an emotional realism that speaks through a synthetic, minimalist language, and for me, full of color. The fine sensitivity of the palpable translated into a pure chromatic range. That is why color often becomes a structural element in my work, not just a decorative element. Thus, the sixteen colors that make up the Laugh and Dance diptych, and which are also broken down into the smallest works, are the colors that embrace a precise moment, a shared memory. Here there are no great pretensions, nor elaborate rhetoric that speak solemnly about art. I don’t want to justify my work. Laugh and Dance evokes an intimate moment, not a private one, in which you connect with your interior, listen to your favorite song, let yourself go, start dancing and smile to yourself because it feels good, because you don’t want to be anywhere else. And you do your best, because maybe there is nothing more serious than laughing and dancing.’

Maru Quiñonero

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ABOUT MARU QUIÑONERO

When the need, understood as a deep feeling that fills everything, compels, a certain responsibility vanishes and surrender arrives. I’ve been needing abstraction for years. That’s why I’ve been surrendered to it for years. I paint it, I study it, I think about it, I touch it, I dream about it, I write about it, I look at it. Abstraction goes in my backpack. Comes with me since 2017. I also have studied color as the main element of my work. And I investigate the use of it in both classical and contemporary artists. On the one hand observing the use that society gives to color within popular culture and on the other hand developing in my practice the emotional charge that exceeds the merely material.

Working with color in this emotional way (and guided by the synesthesia that has accompanied me since I was a child) helps me to create ‘a conversation between color and emptiness’. Six words with which I like to define my work, always with a marked visual cleanliness. Because in my work there will always be an implicit and complicated simplicity. That is why I treasure this quote from Alexander Calder as a premise for my work: ‘If an artwork has a reason for being, it is enough with very few elements.’

Maru Quiñonero