Sitges ReciclArt 2023 is the 7th Festival of responsible art and recycling, held from June 9th to July 9th with a collective exhibition in Miramar Cultural Center, as a central activity. The objective is to promote awareness in the public about the importance of recycling and responsible consumption in order to reduce pollution.
The exhibition brings together 23 artists and shows a selection of sculptures, paintings and collage made by different creators from Sitges, the rest of Catalonia and other countries. The 43 works on display have been created with recycled waste materials and invite us to reflect on climate change and the pollution of the seas and oceans.
ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS
Hatice Rana Tarhangil Karadayi
(Turquía, 1961) Rana is a technical architect and surveyor by profession and an artist by vocation. She feels "indebted" to nature, she tries to be less destructive and transmit the values of reuse, contributing to people's awareness, because we don't have another planet. Her goal is to create an emotional reaction in the viewer caused by the contradiction between the initial attraction of the work and the subsequent message of awareness. To make people think about environmental, social and economic sustainability.
Jana Álvarez
(Torrelavega - Cantabria, 1966) With training in Fine Arts, Fashion Design, Advertising Art and Interior Design, Jana Álvarez goes beyond artistic hashtags, because everything is already multidisciplinary. She has extensive professional experience as a fashion designer, creative in advertising, freelance illustration and painting, props for film and TV production companies and interior design projects and has participated in many national and international exhibitions. Her motivation, both artistic and personal, on a day-to-day basis is to reuse to reach 0 waste. It is critical of the unconscious and unleashed consumer society, which leads us to natural, social and economic extinction.
Anna Ametller
(Barcelona, 1982) Anna Ametller holds a degree in Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, with specialization in drawing. With the sculptor Jaime de Córdoba Benedicto she began to work in sculpture, collaborating in the execution of a public monument. When she settled in Formentera, she began to develop work with waste materials from the sea and found objects. Often these objects recreate this sea and the beings that inhabit it. The works play with the languages of drawing and sculpture.
Miquel Aparici
(Barcelona, 1963) Miquel Aparici studied at the Massana School and works at his industrial studio in Hospitalet. His sculptures are surprising assemblages, made up of recuperated iron and wood objects that have their own history, then are recycled and take on new meaning as works of art. His work is characterized by simplicity. Using few elements of clean lines, he endows his pieces with a brutal expressive force.
Juan Carlos Benyeto
(València, 1960) Juan Carlos Beneyto lives in Barcelona. He graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and he has developed his artistic career in this city. He is a versatile artist, who uses different means of expression: painting, sculpture, illustration, comic, etc. This diversity of forms of expression are facets of the same personal world that is also expressed by recycling the discarded materials from his own workshop and combining them with elements of the natural world, such as stone and wood, to create new works. He has exhibited in Spain (La Caixa Ibiza, Esther Montoriol Gallery, Espacio Artsider, Arte Estudio La Farmacia, Flamicell Arte Contemporáneo), Germany (DIAG – Germanic-Ibero-American Society, Frankfurt) and the USA (Gallery Chez Shaw, Los Angeles and Drap Art Pittsburgh).
Rani Bruchstein
(Tel Aviv, 1973) Bruchstein, a self-taught artist, seeks to establish a close relationship with his subjects. The relationship begins with an invitation to the studio, followed by a brief interview to determine who is the best fit for the project. So far he has invited dozens of people, with whom he has spent hours, if not days, cultivating closeness and intimacy until they felt confident with him and the camera. At this moment, he asks them to reveal themselves gradually, layer by layer, physically and mentally, while at the same time he covers them with makeup like a mask: hiding on one side and revealing on the other.
Luis Cebaqueva
(Córdoba, 1960) The self-taught artist Luis Cebaqueva creates with the intention of exploring various materials, different types of industrial and cultural techniques to try to capture the concern of the current times, such as the environment, humanism and sustainability. His creation is also focused on the search for beauty.
Sol Courreges Boné de la Torre
(Buenos Aires, 1975) Sol Courreges lives and works in Formentera all year since 2011. She sells her works in her stores, the Mola Crafts Fair and in various individual and collective exhibitions. She volunteers holding workshops for children and carrying out awareness campaigns. She cannot imagine her life without creating and recycling. She is convinced that each one of us is a unique and incredible being, that we have to be proud of this instead of being ashamed of being different and develop this potential by doing what we really like and believe in at all times.
Norberto Fuentes
(Casp, 1955) Norberto is a self-taught artist, trained through the practice and insistence constructed day after day. Throughout his career he has explored the "waste" generated by human beings, which has always been linked to his work. Many of his paintings and sculptures are born from a dialogue with great works of the history of art and literature.
Vicky Gómez Talaya
(Barcelona, 1971) In the year 2000 she began her training at the school of the Museo del Cántaro (Pitcher Museum) in Argentona, where she currently works as a resident artist and is a member of the waste research and recycling group. Starting in 2005, she began to participate in craft fairs and in 2018 she incorporated a new line of work, with the name TRANSFORM-ARTE, based on the reuse of waste, creating unique and functional small works of art by recycling recuperated old furniture and objects, as well as clothing. She participates in fairs and sustainable projects, the traveling exhibition of the ceramic waste research and recycling group of the Association of Ceramicists of Barcelona, the Argentona Pitcher Museum (2009) and Artesania Catalunya, as well as several collective exhibitions such as Nadie se ilegal (Nau Art, 2018).
Marie Lalo
(Montreal, Canadà, 1964) It is during her travels that Marie Lalo collects all kinds of papers with which she has created her own technique of "painting on paper" that she improves at the whim of her inspirations. “I like the idea of creating by giving new life to the papers I find. To follow the trajectory of an old magazine found in a Montreal storage room and see it, in my workshop, take on a human form. My works are entirely made out of paper.”
Jordi Lopez-Alert
(Capellades, 1971) López-Alert holds a degree in Fine Arts and a diploma in Library Science and Documentation from the University of Barcelona, UB. In 2009 he spent time in Michigan (USA), where he developed a series of poetic and contemporary works with reused paper bags, which he called the Michigan Paper Series. His interest in the environment, industrial society, the landscape and everything that surrounds him, and how it affects and conditions human life, are recurring in his work. Michigan Papers is the starting point for many of his subsequent artistic proposals, in which he vindicates the contemporaneity of drawing, painting and engraving in a world dominated by digital images, almost always using reused supports.
Nicolas Maas
(Kamp-Lintfort- Alemanya, 1981) As the grandson of a well-known artist from the Lower Rhine region, he was born surrounded by creativity and technical prowess. As a child he spent a lot of time with his grandparents. Basting and painting with his grandfather Helmut and cooking with grandmother Anni were the best pastimes in those days. As he grew older, his interests turned to technology and he decided on a technical career. For a long time, hissing and flickering broken machines were his vocation, but his perspective changed over time and he began to develop creative projects as well, and at a difficult moment in his life, he discovered the forge. Here he can develop his full potential, both creative and technical.
Ignat C. de Michaelis
(Barcelona, 1968) Through his artwork, Ignat C. de Michaelis gives voice to his disagreement with our times, raised thanks to the control of oil; a fire that continues to burn CO₂ in all spheres. The artist sees that societies are installed in a hypocritical filth that we try to clean up with more capital, coming from the same place and ending up in the same landscape: a garbage bag full of packagings that dozes inside a container and is taken in huge trucks to a dump to be burned.
Albert Negredo
(Barcelona, 1979) Albert Negredo uses various disciplines such as photography, video, sculpture, installation, sound and digital art, or fashion, to create works that revolve around 3 positions: the patient in his environment, temporary, perpetual or finite, the doctor or specialist, and the social aspect. To do so, he creates pieces linked to pathologies, discomforts, states, cures, treatments, diseases... to combine the visual arts, not only with psychology and psychiatry, but also with religion and philosophy.
Josep M. Pastó
(Les Borges Blanques, 1964) Josep Maria Pastó lives in Sant Pere de Ribes. His contact with the art world began at a very young age, studying both in private academies and at the Tarrega School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts. Despite the fact that he is professionally dedicated to telecommunications, he has never stopped working with wood, clay and assemblage, motivated by his need for artistic expression, as a counterpoint to his professional task.
Joaquim Riera
(Barcelona, 1953) Joaquim Riera is a retired graphic designer who discovered recycling to create art in 2012. He manipulates and transforms cardboard, egg cups, plastics, cans, tetra brick containers, printed circuits, wood, iron... extending their life and contributing to making a more sustainable world. He creates artworks with their own particular life and visual effects that change according to the viewer's point of view. His sculptures are based on the assemblage of iron and wood, iron and objects that have become obsolete over time, wood rescued from nature itself is the source of inspiration for all of his works.
Enric Servera
(Ciutadella de Menorca, 1970) Servera is a multidisciplinary visual artist, graduated in technical architecture. He began to express himself with painting at a very young age, then delved into photography and later trained in engraving. He founded BIRIBOTIS, an organization that carries out artistic activities and creative art workshops for children and adults in museums, events and cultural centers. He works as a teacher at the TRAÇ School in Barcelona. He has held numerous collective and individual exhibitions.
Jorge Traverso
(Montevideo, 1950) Traverso studied Art History, Painting and Engraving Techniques in Montevideo, until the military dictatorship closed the school. In 1970 he moved to Spain and traveled through several European countries and North Africa. In 1972 he discovered Ibiza and in 1976 Formentera, temporarily residing in El Pilar de la Mola, where he met artists such as Toni Tur "Gabrielet", Guillermo Berrier and Gilbert Herreyns. Established in Barcelona since these days, he combines his artistic concerns with the restoration and trade in antiques, specializing in ethnological objects from Asia and Africa. In 2009 he returned to Formentera, where he has lived and worked since then.
Artists invited by the OOA Gallery from Sitges
Patrick Tagoe-Turkson
(Ghana, 1978) Patrick Tagoe-Turkson's work reflects the way art is expressed in Ghanaian culture, vibrant, poetic and rhythmic. He has received many awards, and has exhibited in Ghana, South Korea, South Africa, Austria, the United States, aswell as other countries. He is well known for his natural art. He is also a photographer and performance artist, combining his practice with teaching. He has an MFA from the College of Art (KNUST) in Ghana. The deliberate and meticulous manipulation and alteration of plastic waste and discarded rubber into striking and vivid explosions of color has become the hallmark of his work. Further examination reveals the artist's preoccupation with capturing and retelling stories, dreams, and hopes. His mesmerizing, energetic and kaleidoscopic compositions achieve just this; materials that have undergone a transformative journey in structure, value and purpose.
Boukaré Bonkoungou
(Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1978) Burkina Faso has a long tradition of working in cast bronze, knowledge passed down from father to son. Boukaré also learned to work with bronze and cast iron in the family workshop. Later, he continued his training at the CNAA, the National Center for Arts and Crafts in Ouagadougou. He combines this technique with recycled materials, such as the wood that he selects in the bush in his country or scraps of the traditional Bogolan textiles. He exhibits in Burkina Faso, France and Catalonia and has won the SIAO prize at the International Crafts Exhibition in Ouagadougou in 2002 and 2001.
Johnson Zuze
(Zimbabwe, 1985) Following his purpose of preserving the health and sustainability of our planet, Gazzambo Gallery has opted for the African artist Johnson Zuze, one of the most established creators of the so-called upcycling art, who in recent years has received numerous awards and nominations. In 2017 Catherine Lieman, founder of the gallery, invited Zuze to become one of the permanent artists in her collection. His works demonstrate the artistic potential that discarded objects found in our day to day can have. Johnson Zuze builds his work from apparently useless pieces and rejected materials such as wire, glass, plastic or rubber; which, when arranged in the appropriate way, become authentic works of art with an evident creative potential.
Artist invited by Artamore Sitges
Sílvia Bofarull Boschsacoma
(Terrassa, 1967) Silvia is a self-taught artist; It is with her hands that she finds her best form of expression, which is why she named her line of creations Artsimans (Arts and hands in Catalan). Boats created with logs and debris washed up on the beach, passing through fresh and salt water, iron, ropes and found sails. She entered the world of volumes and colors through the art of makeup. Then, she takes a leap into the void towards nature, where she finds the forms and the art of recycling, a world of structural assemblies that lead her to experiment with rejected or abandoned materials, which do not make much sense on their own, creating unique objects that provide great personal gratification and learning. Nature offers her an inmense sea of varied findings, which catch her attention, due to the magic they have acquired over time. Each movement involves another movement, a conscious or unconscious transformation. Each action involves a resolution and a growth.
