MARÍA BERRÍO

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring new writing on the artist by Siddhartha Mitter, who comments, ‘Never before has Berrío drawn us so close, invested her figures with this physical power that projects out and scrambles our sensory field. It’s almost aggressive – an interpellation. The tumult on canvas proceeds from a compositional method but addresses the tumult of the world.’

Berrío is celebrated for works that draw upon aspects of mythology and folklore to create narratives that address contemporary issues of identity, agency, and survival, particularly those experienced by women and children in the face of overwhelming ecological, economic or geo-political forces. These new works take place in often crowded interiors, where some characters appear governed by mysterious forces, while others go about their business unconcerned. For the first time, she has collaborated with dancers – from the New York City-based GALLIM contemporary dance company – who, supplied with masks and costumes from the artist’s collection, were invited to improvise movements which fed into Berrío’s working process.

Aspects of fantasy, masquerade, history and our frenetic present are woven together, while the artist’s blending of Japanese papers and watercolour, tender and tactile but always with the turbulent splice of collage as a resounding echo, further articulates the work’s fractured narratives. The results are something like a vibrant, surreal folktale or, as Mitter defines in his essay, ‘the fabric of dreams – no longer their unfurled narratives, but the rough and hectic machinery of their making, the way in which signs, memories and allusions escape the category fetters of the rational mind and collide in unquiet sleep.