The Storehouse Group at CIRCA 08
The Storehouse Group will present their artists for the first time at the international contemporary art fair Circa ’08. Working as a non-space gallery with its headquarters in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the gallery/project will be showing new works from the artists Rogelio Báez-Vega, Efrén Candelaria, Karlo Ibarra, Jason Mena and R-Q at booth A-9 during the third edition of the fair.
“As a gallery, The Storehouse Group is delighted to present the project and it’s new members” Anna Astor, the new director of the gallery, indicated. Astor holds a Masters Degree in Art Markets from the Universidad de Antonio Nebrija in Madrid, Spain, apart from having worked in institutions related with the arts in Puerto Rico and overseas. “Each one of the artists presents a different concept and aesthetic, which in turn, nourishes and diversifies the project, as well as contributing a complete panorama of tendencies present in the international contemporary art scene” concluded Astor. Furthermore, the project re-evaluates the sterile space of a traditional gallery, proposing a series of artistic and/or cultural interventions in non-traditional spaces.
Efrén Candelaria’s work consists of a post-minimalist reductionist style that alternates concepts of time, space and the creative process. His works on paper propose a certain honesty, where his meaning is not important, only the forms, the relationships and the time to experiment them. Rogelio Baez-Vega’s work is submerged between the everyday experience and historic events. In his recent proposal, Baez-Vega works a series of paintings in which he uses architecture as a pretext to investigate the aesthetic experience of the individual.
Karlo Ibarra is characterized for being an artist that manages different media, from painting to video art. He uses them as a mirror to express the relationship that exists between the individual and urban spaces that surrounds him. Ibarra uses themes such as immigration, identity and globalization in his work with strong neo-conceptual under-currents.
Jason Mena’s work consists mainly of photography and its variants. His work is a result of a constant search and questioning of his physical existence and his nature as an artist. The fusion of the enigmatic and the sensation of chaos fills his work with powerful metaphors. R-Q inaugurates a pictorial and sculptural series tilted Off-Limits, where he explores the limits of the subjective consciousness and the objective reach of it’s acts using the line as a metaphor for the flux of these concepts.
The Storehouse Group was born in 2006. In it’s platform, the commitment to divulge new works from it artists within diverse areas of the contemporary art scene is established. In less than one year and a half, the project/gallery and its artists have reached international recognition, after participating in some of the most relevant international art fairs, like Art L.A. in Los Angeles, California; Scope NY ’07 in New York, and Scope Basel, in Basel, Switzerland. In Puerto Rico, the project has sponsored and presented individual shows from the artists Gamaliel Rodriguez, the intellectual author of the project, Efrén Candelaria and Karlo Ibarra. The gallery intends to start a new season of shows that that will begin with its presentation in Circa ’08. All shows will be announced on their website.