Darío Villalba, Solo Show
Galerie Poggi is delighted to present the first major solo exhibition of Darío Villalba (1939-2018) in France.
Villalba became a major artist on the Spanish scene ever since his emergence in the late 60s, and was in dialogue with many of the avant-garde movements, from American pop, which he witnessed at the start of his career, to conceptual art, informal art, practices responding to the AIDS crisis, and performance art. One of the pioneers in the various uses of photography, Villalba transformed the photographic image into a real syntax of painting, opening the field, for example, to the so-called “plastician” photography. Taking anonymous figures from the margins of society (young people, the elderly, the mentally ill, prisoners, the homeless, etc.), his work is filled with a profound search for humanity that needs to be read against the upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century, and aimed to give these protagonists, as well as the image itself, their “maximum transcendence”.
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Villalba’s work is held in over 75 museums worldwide, including MoMA, the Guggenheim in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museo Reina Sofia, etc. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofia in 2007 and a landmark exhibition at Madrid’s Sala de Alcalá in 2019, curated by Manuel Segade. However, his work has only rarely been shown in France, with the exception of his “Encapsulados” which were exhibited at the 14th Lyon Biennial, and at the Couvent des Jacobins by the Collection Pinault in 2018.
The exhibition at the gallery is organized in collaboration with Darío Villalba’s estate and Galería Luis Adelantado in Valencia (Spain). It will run from December 15 to January 27, 2024.
Alongside Darío Villalba’s solo show, Galerie Poggi will inaugurate its Project Room with an exhibition by Josèfa Ntjam, highlighting her interest in the abyss. Drawing parallels between space and underwater expanses, Ntjam draws upon afrofuturist narratives to transform these places into new utopias, capable of accommodating imaginations sidelined on dry land.Josèfa Ntjam is currently enjoying a solo exhibition at the Pernod Ricard Foundation.
