Exhibition ‘Cultivating the Uncanny’ by Álvaro Perdices

This exhibition offers an anthological view of the career of Álvaro Perdices (Madrid, 1971). To this end, it presents a selection of projects undertaken from the early 1990s until 2022, in addition to others conceived specifically for La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. Finally, updated versions of different installations are also displayed.

Cultivating the Uncanny allude here to a whole array of meanings. ‘Cultivate’ is a reference to that which needs to be fed in order to grow, be it a crop, an ideology or oneself. ‘Cultivate’ is a mention of landscapes, nature and botany on the outskirts, which signify so much in Perdices’ work ‘Cultivate’ is in homage to the book Cultivos (2008) by the writer and editor Julián Rodríguez, a fundamental figure in the artist’s development.

On the other hand, the 'uncanny’, understood here on the basis of that definition that associates it with the queer and the strange in keeping with the famous exhibition series by Mike Kelley— another of Perdices’ referents—as there is a distortion, a search for those indecipherable zones that destabilise the normative and make it obsolete or alienating, zones to which Perdices dedicated no small effort to sowing and sustaining.

Perdices’ own creative itinerary is an example of this. In 1993, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at postgraduate school at UCLA and was a teacher at Twentieth Street Elementary School. During these years, he came into contact with some of the leading artists on the LA scene in the 1990s, among them Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Lari Pittman. In 2011, he returned to Madrid and began to work as an exhibition curator and coordinator for the Museo del Prado. 

This apparent dialectic between what we could call the underground and erudition is the foundation of his projects, which often ‘address’ certain forms of dissidence through micro-historical operations and gestures, or which ‘read’ the history of art while freeing it from any academicism, as if it were a kind of long missive with multiple senders, a letter written by Velázquez and Kenneth Anger, Cornelis van Poelenburgh and Andy Warhol at the same time 

Álvaro Perdices has been a pioneer in opposing human action and the response to it by a nature that warns us through ecological anarchy of the dangers of progress. In addition, thirty years ago he explored free education, cooperative approaches with children in their formative years and the tools they themselves can make in the face of coercive pedagogical models. 

The show ends with Forms for a Forthcoming Future (2025), which revisits the rehearsals directed in 1936 by Pura Maortua and Federico García Lorca of Lorca’s play Así que pasen cinco años (When Five Years Pass, 1931), together with ceramic designs by Maruja Mallo that disappeared during bombardments in the Spanish Civil War. These two projects cut short return today to the exhibition rooms of La Virreina as part of a restitution that is still awaiting completion.