Tijeras en los ojos: Patricia Gadea
Twenty years after her death, this exhibition recovers the work of Patricia Gadea, marked by an incisive reflection on her own time. Gadea was not a painter of autonomous or closed forms, but of materials in transit. She worked with everything that fell into her hands, activating a critical thinking based on a disobedient use of the visual. As Francisco Calvo Serraller wrote, “rather than applying cut and paste, it seems she has scissors in her eyes”. It is not only a matter of technique, but of a way of looking.
Situated in the context of Madrid postmodern painting, Patricia Gadea developed an eclectic practice of strong colorism, traversed by collage and by references to pop culture. Her work, from the beginning, is inscribed in the context of the Movida, a moment marked by the hybridization of languages and the dissolution of hierarchies. With the process of democratic change in Spain, her work acts as a critical device that challenges the dominant imaginaries of the time from a conscious and provocative position. Gadea assimilates these influences in order to question them. Her eclectic iconography gives rise to a beautiful chaos that overflows the limits between abstraction and figuration.
In 1985, Patricia Gadea, José Maldonado, Manolo Dimas, César Fernández Arias and Juan Ugalde created the Mari Boom gallery, occupying an underground passage near Retiro Park, in Madrid. The action sought to break down the barriers between high and low culture and to question the legitimized spaces of art. More than three decades later, in 2018, the space was reactivated by seventeen women artists, such as Marina Vargas, María María Acha-Kutscher and Sandra Gamarra, through a feminist action of artistic guerrilla, with the aim of making visible the persistent inequality in the art system and the scarce presence of women artists in exhibition circuits. The action, documented in video and photography, forms part of this exhibition.
At the end of the 1980s, Patricia Gadea settles in New York, at a moment of intense artistic effervescence and strong politicization of the cultural field. Her painting begins to shift toward a more conceptual dimension. This is not a cold conceptualism, but a painting that criticizes itself, grinds itself down and expands. Everyday experience becomes a starting point for raising broader questions, such as capitalism, globalization, our relationship with consumer images and the
construction of the experience of being a woman in that immediate environment. In this period, Gadea comes into contact with other artists and cultural agents, among them Carlos Pazos, with whom she collaborated on one of the works included in the exhibition. This context of exchange was decisive for the development of her later collective practices.
In this way, the foundations of Estrujenbank take shape, conceived as a practice that combined political satire and critical action, understanding art as a way of life and as a questioning of the very system that sustains it. The group was made up of the artist, her partner Juan Ugalde, Dionisio Cañas and Mariano Lozano. After her return to Madrid, the collective held its first exhibition, coinciding with the moment in which Gadea was working on the sketches of her 1989 notebook that articulates this exhibition. These function as a space of process, where ideas are tested and contaminate one another.
Shortly thereafter, her work consolidates a mordant reading of the Spanish context through the recurrent appearance of clowns, beasts and circus figures. Some of the works presented, such as that of Estrujenbank and later collages like the one from 1994, dialogue directly with this theme in which the grotesque and the political intertwine. The circus thus functions as a metaphor for power turned into spectacle, which disguises itself and legitimizes itself through its mechanisms of propaganda.
Her separation from Juan Ugalde and the distancing from Estrujenbank mark a decisive rupture. It responds to a need for self-affirmation, for a separation of languages and techniques. From then on, her work acquires a darker and more introspective tone, centered on female archetypes that question the very notion of “woman”. Characters taken from comics and advertising appear as exploited, fragmented or caricatured bodies, revealing the mechanisms of representation and consumption that traversed what was the feminine of the time.
In 1996, Patricia Gadea leaves Madrid to treat her addiction and rebuild her life away from the speed of the city. Her painting asserts itself as an artisanal and everyday exercise, a space of resistance against hyperexposure and excess. The work becomes more intimate, with a sketch-like line and cryptic iconography, where the body and fragility occupy a central place. Settled in Palencia, she teaches art and develops her work on the margins of the main circuits until the end of her life.
The trajectory of Patricia Gadea is permeated by a constant questioning of the aesthetic and of the place of the woman artist. Considered today a key figure in Spanish painting, she articulated a perspective without programmatic militancy, but without concessions in the face of male predominance in society and in the artistic system. Throughout her work, this thinking unfolds in multiple forms and supports, achieving a singular equation between conceptual complexity and formal immediacy. Like scissors in the eyes, Gadea does not seek to fix a gaze, but to interfere with it. In this capacity to transform vital tensions into plastic language resides the intensity, urgency and speed of a body of work inseparable from life. Her principal love was art and, in a radical way, she lived and died traversed by that commitment.
