Statement Profile GlogauAIR Project CV Summary

Statement

Our work is someone’s story who sees no point in making art because he has lost any hope in the human being. He thinks we are a terrible species dragging the whole planet into death and extinction. But as he is bored he decides to entertain himself by celebrating a funeral for the world … his own world as well. And in this gesture he finds the meaning of art that he was no longer looking for, that is to say, he discovers it in the abyss, in the dark beauty hidden within human monstrosity. Something which is a melancholic contradiction: very much to his regret, in this same gesture of despair towards the human being, he shows a terrible faith in men, because deep down he believes that they have similar wounds and will understand him.

Profile

GlogauAIR Project

The year without a summer
We don’t just want to talk about the excesses of our time, we want to include ourselves deep into them. It is clear that we live immersed in a world of ruins, a world whose pretensions to modernity have ended up reducing history to debris. Only by living among the ruins you begin not to differentiate them. To not distinguish between the traces of what was and the collapse jet to come… between the ghosts of the past and the announced monsters of the future.

And this is where we place the starting point of the residency at GlogauAIR. In a research exercise inside this diffuse crack that defines our time, an archaeology behind this interpretation of the ruin as a sign of the moment of cultural, political and ecological rupture that we live in. We will therefore start from our personal wreck and the approaching humanity collapse to treat it as a precarious sculpture of what is about to disappear, a choreography of the fragile and the destruction: celebrating the ruin as an objective, as an aesthetic ideal, as a perfect state.

CV Summary

Carlos Maté and Elena Urucatu are visual artists based in Madrid. Carlos has a background in architecture and design, Elena in industrial design and in 2012 they joined forces under the name of Carlos Maté studio and gradually made the transition to the visual arts, where they work especially in installation, performance, sculpture and drawing, but also video and sound art and even poetry and literature.

Their work has been seen at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Media Lab-Prado, Centre del Carme, the Fiart Foundation, Luisa delle Piane Gallery and Modus Operandi Gallery, at Sonar Barcelona, as well as at the Ljubljana Biennial and Design Week in Milan.

Carlos Maté Studio/ Artist duo
Carlos Maté (1978, Burgos, Spain) + Elena Urucatu (1981, Bucharest, Romania)

Solo Exhibitions
2020 The blink of an alien. Modus Operandi, Madrid
2019 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Modus Operandi Gallery, Madrid
2018 Invented Memories, TheRedoom Gallery, Madrid
2017 Invented Memories, University of Burgos
2016 Darkness. Instalation at SONAR2016, Barcelona
2014 Melancholia Gran vía. Gran via 56 Gallery. Madrid
2014 Initiation. La Neomudéjar Art Center, Madrid
2014 She was Here. Living room. Ventura Lambrate. Milano
2012 Inner world prototypes. Light Space Milano

Collective exhibitions

2020 Made In. Violencias Silenciadas. Madrid
2018 Contra la censura. Itinerante
2018 Demodé. Centro Dados Negros. Ciudad Real
2018 Black or White. Circulo de Bellas Artes. Madrid
2018 Usa, Flags. Aspa Contemporary. Madrid
2017 Stickers PAC. Feria Estampa. Madrid
2017 Usa, Flags. Centre del Carme. Valencia
2017 Usa, Flags. Circulo de Bellas Artes. Madrid
2015 Hostel Art. Plataform a Arte contemporánea. Madrid
2014 Vanguardias y Periferias. La Neomudejar. Madrid
2014 Heroins, Sierra Norte Art Center, Madrid
2013 Masquelibros. COAM, Madrid