"Eulalia Valldosera: Works 1990 - 2000"
2000-10-15 until 2000-12-03
Witte de With Center for Contemportary Art
Rotterdam, , NL

Since 1990, Eulalia Valldosera (Vilafranca del Penedes, Barcelona, 1963) has created an oeuvre of unusual beauty. In her installations, crafted from light, shadow, reflection, and movement, she distils a constellation of dreamlike moments centering on the female body, domestic intimacy, and the everyday objects and specific places that create this intimacy.

Works 1990 -2000, Valldosera's first retrospective exhibition is a co-production of Witte de With and the Fundaciķ Antoni Tāpies in Barcelona.

Feminine archetypes are a recurring theme in the work of Eulālia Valldosera: the domestic environment, motherhood, the body and the male gaze. Reacting to the position of the art object as a part of the market economy, she employs her own body as a starting point for her art. Valldosera believes there is a taboo surrounding such corporeality, particularly in Europe: the taboo of flesh, sex, illness and death. The female body occupies a central position in the presentation on the lower floor of this exhibition. Here the body serves as means of identification, a subject of beauty, of reproduction, contamination and decay. But it is also a fleshy machine that has to be cleaned and fed.

On the upper floor of the exhibition the focus shifts from the body to the objects that surround it. Under the title Appearances the spaces have been arranged like the rooms of a house: a dining room, living rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. Each space is linked to a particular function of the human body. The works form the total bodily experience of the architectural space. Objects are transformed into 'social mediators' in these installations: they say something about the culture, the desire, the emotions and the daily life of the people who acquired them and took them into their environment. The light brings with it a dark side, the hidden meaning of the objects on the surface. In Valldosera's world, the shadows, as anti-objects, refer to a collective subconscious.

Valldosera studied at the Universidad de Bellas Artes and the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de Catalunya in Barcelona before she completed her education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1992. Her work was shown in, among others, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kwang-ju (South-Korea, 1995), the 10e Biennial of Sydney (1996), the 2e Johannesburg Biennial in Johannesburg (1997) and the 5e Biennial of Istanbul (Turkey; 1997). In the Netherlands, her work was on view in W139 (Amsterdam, 1992) and Manifesta 1 (Rotterdam, 1996).

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