Galeria ESTIARTE is taking part in the BEIJING CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR, CIGE 08, with photographs from Chinese artist Zhu Ming and paintings and photographs by Spanish artists José María Sicilia, José Ramón Amondarain, Jose Manuel Ballester, Darío Urzay, Lidia Benavides and Eduardo Nave plus graphic work by John Baldessari.

ESTIARTE
Founded in 1972, Galería Estiarte specialises its activity in the edition of photography, graphic work, video and works on paper by contemporary artists, and in publicising and disseminating all aspects referring to the field of edition, which it does by means of taking part in fairs, both national and international, the holding of exhibitions and the publication of specialised articles, catalogues and books.

In its publishing facet, Estiarte has edited various series of graphic and photographic works by contemporary Spanish artists such as Jaume Plensa, Abraham Lacalle, Pello Irazu, José María Sicilia, Luis Gordillo, José Guerrero, Gerardo Rueda, Gustavo Torner, José Manuel Ballester, Darío Urzay, José Manuel Ciria, Victoria Civera, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Concha García, Lidia Benavides, Soledad Sevilla, Jordi Teixidor, Antón Lamazares, Broto or Juan Uslé among others.

In its facet of disseminating 20th century prints, Estiarte has organised exhibitions of such masters as Picasso, Chagall, Miró, Matisse, Derain, Sonia Delaunay, Braque, Kupka, Rouault, Max Ernst, Andre Masson or Fernand Léger whose work it holds as part of its collection.

Moreover, and heeding the main currents of international plastic art, the graphic work and photography of such artists as Sean Scully, Jean Marc Bustamente, Jan Dibbets, Alechinsky, Bacon, Baselitz, Arnulf Rainer, David Hockney, Calder, S.W. Hayter, E. Kelly, Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Henry Moore, Richard Serra, Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Günther Förg or Claude Viallat are regularly to be seen in the gallery's exhibitions and collection.

In this regard, over its more than thirty years of activity, Estiarte has been enriching its gallery collections with the graphic work of fundamental Spanish artists, notable among whom are Palazuelo, Saura, Tàpies, Chillida and Millares as well as Sicilia, Broto, Barceló, Campano, Carlos León, Eva Lootz or Jaume Plensa and Darío Urzay.

Estiarte is a founder member of ARTEMADRID, the association of contemporary art galleries in Madrid, and has been exhibiting at the ARCO international fair of contemporary art since it first began. It currently takes part in the photography fairs DPHOTO, PARISPHOTO, PHOTOLONDON, PHOTOMIAMI and ARTBEIJING.


José Ramón Amondarain
Estiarte presents the latest paintings and photographs from José Ramón Amondarain (San Sebastián, 1964), one of the Spanish artists who in the last ten years has best contributed to the creation of a painting updated via reflection on the image and technology. His works have always dealt with painting: with the representation of painting, with the form and matter of painting, with photography transformed by painting, with painting executed with industrial method on canvas. In these recent series of photographs and paintings titled Untitle Film Stills and Nudes, respectively, Amondarain works on photographs by Cindy Sherman and Tomas Ruff, reproducing the original photos in painting and colour and editing the final work in photography using digital tools. In this way the artist establishes the dissolution and confusion of frontiers between techniques and procedures with a result that is as attractive as it is enigmatic, which opens up a wide field of reflection for the viewer.

John Baldessari
The first of the inhabitants of the conceptual environmental of the seventies in the USA along with Sol Lewitt and Douglas Huebler, John Baldessari (National City, California, 1931) started to become interested in the connections between word and image in the space of the canvas that until then was reserved for painting. At all times taking photographic images, either with his own camera or appropriating them from magazines and other publications, and afterwards transferred to canvas, Baldessari makes them interrelate with the semantic content of written texts, though never in a formalistic way. Most often his works show us the duality of the image/text on the basis of quotes taken from the History of Art, from manuals on artistic and photographic procedures or from snapshots of everyday subjects taken by Baldessari himself and combined with painted texts. In the case of the work that we bring to the CIGE stand, Life's Balance (with money), signed in 1990, Baldessari takes stills from B movies, images of the circus and of the world of entertainment or directly from television in order, once cooled and decontextualised, to place them in relation with minimal interventions of composition and colour.

José Manuel Ballester
One of the most international artists of his generation, José Manuel Ballester (Madrid, 1960) arrives on the Estiarte stand in CIGE in order to present new photographs. With his long-standing relationship with China, Ballester has made several trips around the country photographing its new modernity and he has had a major exhibition of his photographs in the Beijing CAFA in 2007. Here Ballester marks out for us the structure of one of the new bridges under construction in China in which the framing and its formal analysis, the contrast with the night sky and its huge scale generate an enveloping and majestic presence. And accompanying this piece, Ballester offers us a delicious composition firmly structured and balanced, a photograph of large dimensions which uses moments in the construction of the new Television Tower of Beijing. In both, the artist shows us scenes compositionally, atmospherically and chromatically subjected to that process of cooling of reality, of minimalist dispossession, an essential trait of that particular poetics of desolate distant resonances which characterises his work. Since the end of the nineties, Ballester has been the subject of major photography exhibitions, notable among which is the one held in Estiarte in 2000, in the Gallera de Valencia in 2003, in the Burgos Art Centre in 2004 and in IVAM and the Palacio de Velázquez of MNCARS in 2005 and, in 2007, he has recently held photography exhibitions in Toronto, New York and Paris, his most important project to date being the exhibition held in the Beijing CAFA in 2007.

Lidia Benavides
With the work of Lidia Benavides (Madrid, 1971) titled Postdamer platz, Estiarte presents photographs from 2007 in which the city of Berlin is subjected to the abstract and luminous filtering of Benavides' work who has been developing a general project of plastic investigation with light on various different media and processes which have led her to working through photography and video since 1995 in order to produce a highly personal language within photographic abstraction.

Zhu Ming
The performances of the young Chinese artist Zhu Ming (Changsha, Hunan, China, 1972) explores concepts such as protection, vulnerability and interdependence referring to the construction of personal identity. These works imply subjecting his own body to a limit state as in the series produced in Sydney harbour inside a plastic ball, or in the works which we present on the stand, in which the artist is smeared with a fluorescent liquid in order to illuminate and photograph himself. The use of ink, so intimately tied to Chinese education and discipline through writing, is another of his resources.

Eduardo Nave
Trained in photography studies, in 1998 Eduardo Nave (Valencia, 1977) started to produce photo-reportages of handicapped and marginalised social groups, with a tone and intent of powerful commitment. Series such as Paisajes intermedios (2000-2005) and Campos de Arroz (2004-2005) led him into experimenting with the landscape genre from experimentation with rolls of film and an extreme subjectivity leading to abstraction. Various study grants took him to working in several different cities from which he brought back Matrix-Manía (2003), a study of Paris through advertising, and Normandie: Les Rivages du dèbarquement (2003-2005), showing the beaches and landing areas of D-Day. Estiarte presents his latest work produced in burned woods in Spain.

José María Sicilia
In Madrid, in May 2003 Galería Estiarte presented the series Monotipos, by José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954). New papers from Sicilia now arrive at CIGE with the monotype technique produced for the occasion and signed in his Paris workshop a few weeks ago. In these pieces, a follow-up to the earlier series, insects, flies, bees, wasps and blowflies return to the paper via the hand of Michael Woolworth, the printer for the series with whom Sicilia works shoulder to shoulder, combining flights and swarms in phosphorescences, glazes and traces which give his new prints an unfinished life of painting on paper.

Paul Schütze
Paul Schütze (Melbourne, 1958) is a veteran musician well known among the followers of the "new musics" who, since the eighties, has produced more than a dozen discs with record companies such as Extreme or Virgin, and has created some of the best soundtracks in electronic music of recent decades. His style is very personal and has been classified as "ambient" with a background in contemporary electroacoustic music and electronic jazz, whose main characteristic is that of generating highly abstract imaginary worlds. Knowing this principle, it is tempting to think of a visual use of time as a plastic concept yet nevertheless, more than this, Paul Schütze's work distils specific, unrepeatable, intuited moments, volatile and non-temporal experiences. In addition to his own works for video and photography which he has been exhibiting for the last decade, Paul Schütze has also composed acoustic pieces for works by James Turrel, Isaac Julien or Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Darío Urzay
Darío Urzay (Bilbao, 1958) brings to the Estiarte Stand his latest paintings revealing his particular reflection surrounding the relation between reality and fiction, by means of hybridising techniques and processes, concepts related to multiplicity, authenticity and simulacrum of the work of art and its creative reverses. At all times from the technical and conceptual rigour which marks this unavoidable protagonist of contemporary plastic art. This time with his latest plastic discoveries relating painting and video, technological and manual image.

Further Information
Booth B45-51
24 to 28 April 2008
World Trade Center, Beijing