ARCO Madrid

For our fifth edition of ARCO Madrid, in 2021 we are presenting a solo show by Cuban artist Glenda Leoón. Leon proposes ways of experiencing the contemporary that include, not only the rational thought, but also the emotional attitude of each spectator. Thus, her pieces function as portals that bring personal experience to a possible positive solution to the tensions and conflicts of existence.

From an intense exercise of observation of the everyday, Glenda León generates an ecosystem of works in which she gathers diverse ideas about the poetic, the marginal, the feminine and the way in which these concepts constantly break into the world of the mundane. The works that emerge from this process of digestion of reality, in which various conceptual strategies operate, are complex mental constructions whose meanings are built through a system of relationships between memories, emotions and cultural processes. However, formally they possess a distinctive subtlety.

León, proposes ways of experiencing the contemporary that include, not only the rational thought, but also the emotional attitude of each spectator. Thus, her pieces function as portals that bring personal experience to a possible positive solu-tion to the tensions and conflicts of existence.

Using objects of common use belonging to the unconscious collective memory, such as typewriters, medicines, strings of musical instruments, Leon tries to redirect the energies of the spectators towards a possible solution, in opposition to a fatalistic vision of contemporaneity.