A tiny room in the back of our bookshop was turned into a big gallery space when we realized books are actually very small. Every month we hold monographic exhibitions, most of them devoted to the presentation of our own small-run artist books and prints. A public opening sets the start of each project, announced by our monthly invitations sent by mail to our friends and customers, and that are designed after the deeply missed postcards from ‘La Sala Vinçon’.
Tres películas is the triptych of films by Paula Giménez Monar consisting of Verano, Ante cosas así and Me voy. Me Voy. They will be in continuous projection in our exhibition space, presented by Temporal.
“I’m okay is the title of this project, and it is also what Itziar, my 14-year-old cousin, always says to me. She doesn’t add anything else, and it’s such an ambiguous “I’m okay” that I never know how to take it.”
With this installation that accompanies the launch of her book, the artist aims to create a sheltered and soft space to display these delicate images that she has taken of teenagers but also the ones that she took of herself at that age.
The sheets, the refuge par excellence of the adolescent, transport us directly to that universe, to that vital stage, at the same time as it engages us to a more intimate process of viewing the moment that we enter the little space.
In short, this hut, this refuge, as well as being a metaphor for adolescent representation itself due to its fragile structure, aims to protect and give the importance that these portraits, which are normally quickly consumed on social media or in regular photographic displays, deserve.
Todos mis ojos is an exhibition of original paintings by Amara Nasira which comprise Terranova’s new book, Sudokus.
A few months back, after a visit to her house, a friend of the painter left abandoned a cheap little sudoku booklet. Amara Nasira couldn’t help but complete it in her own particular way.
The book is a facsimile edition that reproduces the original without any interference. The exhibition consists of the torn-out pages nailed to the walls of our gallery. All original paintings are available for purchase.
This exibition is a natural follow up to Graffiti, Antonio Xoubanova’s book published by Ca l’Isidret in 2021. The author and the book designer, David Mozzeta, take the book to a third dimension.
Besides painting the walls of our small gallery with drawings reminiscent of another photobook with the same title (Brassaï’s Graffiti from 1960), a few selves showcase Xoubanova’s book customized and transformed by a group of fellow artists and friends invited by the author and Terranova. The resulting books were on display and available for sale, together with other copies of Graffiti customized by Antonio Xoubanova and David Mozzetta live before the audience in the opening of the exhibition.
The full list of participating artists included Albert Cano, Oriol Enguany, Erik Von Frankenberg, Alejan dro Marote, Piereeno, Raquel Quevedo, José Quintanar, Giovanni Spera, Strike, Kentaro Terajima, Miguel Ángel Tornero e Irkus (m) Zeberio.
Raquel Quevedo’s transformed copy of Graffiti was on display at the left window of the bookshop.
Celebrated architect Franc Fernández has been spending his summers in Greece for almost thirty years, always carrying in his pocket small notebooks in which he’s been drawings sketches of landscapes, buildings and other details he’s come across. For the first time he shows in public a selection of such private works, which were never meant to be shared, and putting them together in a small self-published booklet that surprisingly is his first ever output in paper format, since he’s always rejected publishing a monography about his work as an architect.
All three walls of our small back-room gallery were filled floor to ceiling with pages cut out from his notebooks, forming an overwhelming collage of dozens of the places he’s visited during his journeys in Greece.
For the first time we gave both inside (gallery) and outside (shop window) spaces to the same artist, Olivia Albanell, to work on two parallel installations that were constantly evolving during the month long exhibition, that ended up being more of an artist residency than a regular show. Olivia splashed her work around in a free form logic that comes from her own personal instinct, changing it, adding and taking away elements that included everything from drawings and personal notebooks to tiny sculptures, organic pieces like wood and sea shells hanging from strings and found objects that she combines until it all makes sense.
For over a month, which included long visits, private tours and plain hanging around, she invaded parts of our bookshop transforming them into a physical output of her mind, her imagination and her soul.
Dominican artist Mayte Nicole Esteban approached Terranova with the idea of publishing a set of Tarot cards, based on her illustrations of the twenty two main arcana figures from the Marseille tradition. The project soon evolved into an artist edition, consisting of big sized postcards screenprinted on white ink over black cardboard, a fold out poster with poems by Alejandra Smits and Julia Guzman, and a ceramic container made by designer and potter Robbie Whitehead.
The exhibition served as a presentation for the artist edition, with all original artwork on display, the boxed sets piling up against the corner, and a solitary wax candle by Krystel Cárdenas in the opposite wall. A small sized catalogue was published by Terranova with a reproduction of all twenty-two ink illustrations and an interview with Mayte Nicole Esteban by Alba Galocha.
Since the moment he settled in Rotterdam, José Quintanar has been working around the concept of the Dutch landscape, mainly as a pictorial tradition in Art History, one based in the construction (and deconstruction) of the elements of a landscape, but also as an exploration of the idea of colonization of a given space.
For his 13th instalment in this series, Quintanar was invited by Terranova for the inauguration show of their new library and the back-room gallery devoted to installations around the editorial practice. The artist chose to adapt the idea of colonization by stamping a deconstructed drawing of a landscape into the pages of 91 different books bought in the second-hand bookshops found around the docks of Rotterdam.
As it’s common to his practice, he single-handedly did the whole process himself. He drew the landscape, deconstructed its lines, made 16 wooden blocks out of it (13 drawings + 3 title pages), personally selected and bought the books, stamped them with red ink, cut and folded all 91 jackets individually out of Dutch-orange paper, and numbered all books after previsualizing the position of each of them in the gallery space.
All 91 books, along the molds used to stamp them and all twelve previous publications from his Dutch Landscape series, were exhibited and up for sale, marking the first ever publication of an artist book from Terranova. A small catalogue was also published as a friendly companion to the exhibition, containing an in-depth interview with the artist by Terranova founder Luis Cerveró, together with a few samples of stamped pages from different books and a thorough bibliography of José Quintanar’s complete publications to date.