Under 35: Selected by Ivorypress

On May 26, as part of PHotoEspaña’s Festival Off, Ivorypress will present the group exhibition Under 35, which brings together the work of five young Spanish photographers: Laia Abril, Alberto Lizaralde, Javier Marquerie Thomas, Óscar Monzón and Jordi Ruiz Cirera. Influenced by their own environment and conscious of the importance of their work at this moment in time, the work of these five up-and-coming artists reflects a new generation of Spanish photographers with an international presence. The lack of institutional support has led several of them to become their own managers, publishing and promoting their own work with great creative freedom, energy and eagerness, which has resulted in the most significant and inspiring work the genre has seen in recent years. The overarching elements of the works on show in this exhibition are the curiosity and inquisitiveness of these photographers. Laia Abril’s project The Epilogue documents the grieving process of the Robinson family after losing their daughter Cammy to bulimia. Abril reconstructs her life through family snapshots, objects and documents and offers a different point of view of bulimia by showing the different issues and conflicts Cammy struggled with thoughout her life and their effect on the indirect victims of this disease. Everything will be ok, by Alberto Lizaralde, is a reflective project produced throughout the course of five years, after an emotional breakdown. The series has a narrative structure in three acts, halfway between fiction and reality. Javier Marquerie Thomas takes a historical approach in Los Barros del Monje, in which he returns to 1937 to revisit the Battle of Brunete from his family’s country estate, where it took place. The photographs, which show a landscape bursting with ammunition and shrapnel, create a narrative in which, alongside his family, Marquerie confronts the landscape, the ammunition found in it and the stars that unite them to the soldiers, thus constructing a tale about the war, despite not having lived through it. With Karma, a project produced between 2009 and 2013, Óscar Monzón uses cars as a metaphor for humankind, studying the attitudes and behaviours of people through their vehicles. It’s a powerful work that shows a social and aesthetic evolution motivated by the human desire to achieve the perfection of a machine. In the work The United Soya Republic, Jordi Ruiz Cirera documents, in an intersectional way, the changes in the landscape and socioeconomic fabric that the agricultural export model is producing in Paraguay, currently the world’s fourth largest exporter of soy, a million-dollar transnational industry. The selection is completed with a small display case with small-format photographs, as well as studies and sketches of the publications of the five artists included in the exhibition. Under 35 will be on display at Ivorypress until 18 July 2015.