BLOW DE LA BARRA ATHENS!

Pablo Leon de la Barra working at his gallery office in Athens



Federico Herrero paintings in room1


Federico Herrero paintings in room2


Federico Herrero paintings in the kitchen


Federico Herrero interventions on the kitchen tiles


Carolina Caycedo's flags, Greek-Cypriot-Turkish and Greek-Albanian



Miltos Manetas take away posters


Angleo Plessas website DestroyAthens.com


Federico Herrero site specific painting on rooftop (under process)


Federico Herrero flooded rooftop


Federico Herrero at Rooftop at Sunset



Blow de la Barra ATHENS
LEONIDOU 11, 3rd, 4th floor and rooftop, KERAMEIKOS, ATHENS TEL: +44(0)7759022545
info@blowdelabarra.com www.blowdelabarra.com

Blow de la Barra is pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition
FEDERICO HERRERO
PAINTINGS

Blow de la Barra Athens is also presenting work by:
ANGELO PLESSAS / MILTOS MANETAS / CAROLINA CAYCEDO

Opening: Saturday September 8th, 7PM - 10 PM
Gallery hours opening weekend: September 8th, 9th and 10th, 2007, 12:00 to 24:00 PM
Gallery hours afterwards: Saturdays and Sundays, 4PM to 8PM and by appointment
Rooftop open daily
The exhibition will remain open until October 13, 2007

******************************
FEDERICO HERRERO
PAINTINGS
Federico Herrero will present a series of new paintings; a site specific painting on the rooftop of the building with almost 360 degrees view of Athens; and a slideshow of photographs of the towns of Atenas and Grecia in Costa Rica. Federico Herrero’s tropical-oriental-abstract-surrealist expressionist paintings are both colour fields and mental landscapes made by layers of paint which exist on canvas and on three dimensional spaces. Herrero’s interest in paint resides in the basic act of painting: the application of colour over surfaces. In doing so he opposes traditional notions of painting expanding the field to new possibilities.

Federico Herrero was born in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1978, where he lives and works. In 2001 at the 49th Venice Biennale he was awarded the Golden Lion for the best artist under 35. Herrero has also participated at the Medellin Biennale 2007; Moscow Biennale 2007; Singapoore Biennale 2006; Aichi World Expo 2005, Nagoya, Japan; the 1st Seville Biennial, Seville, Spain, 2004, (curated by Harald Szeemann); Puerto Rico 04 Art Biennial, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2004; the 8th Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba, 2003; Urgent Painting, Musee d’ Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002 (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist). His work was included in Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, published by Phaidon in 2002. He also participated in the publication and e-flux project The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By an Artist, published by Revolver in 2004 and curated by Jens Hoffmann. He is currently showing at Passangers, at Wattis in San Francisco, where he’ll have a solo show in August 2008.

******************************
ANGELO PLESSAS
WEBSITE TRIANGLE
In the occassion of the three Septemeber biennials (Athens, Istanbul and Lyon). artist Angelo Plessas is doing an internet guerilla project. Plessas, an artist that uses the internet as his medium and domain names as titles for his pieces, got inspired by the three strange biennial titles and he bought their .coms, which had been left unused by the organisers. These titles are:
www.DestroyAthens.com (Athens Biennial),
www.NotOnlyPossibleButAlsoNecessary.com ( Istanbul Biennial) and
www.TheHistoryOfADecadeThatHasNotYetBeenNamed.com (Lyon Biennial).
When he found out that the grouping of these three biennials had been given the name "Tres bienn", he also registered www.Tresbienn.com as junction point for this 3-part project. The artworks he created are not related to the biennials themselves but are an artist's impression of the titles, along with a feeling for each city. Each of the works is launched one day before the official opening of each biennial. They will be also showed by 3 different galleries that will operate temporarily in parallel to the Athens Biennial, Blow de la Barra (London), Rebecca Camhi (Athens), Rodeo (Istanbul).

******************************
MILTOS MANETAS
OUTSIDE OF THE INTERNET THERE IS NO GLORY is a take away poster project by Miltos Manetas. Posters will also be pasted around the neighbourhood of Kerameikos.

Miltos Manetas was born in Athens, Greece. He currently lives and works between Milan, London, Athens and Los Angeles. Manetas has produced oil paintings of wires, cables and computer hardware. Impatient with critics and curators who had yet to come up with a new "-ism" for a new art movement that reflected our times, Manetas hired Lexicon Branding, a California firm responsible for creating product names as Powerbook and Pentium, to create a new name for this new movement. In May 2000, during a packed press conference at the Gagosian Gallery in New York - and a panel of intellectuals and scientists to provide analysis of the term -- Manetas unveiled a new word for the new art movement. It was a computer voice that made the announcement: “Ladies and Gentleman, the new name for contemporary art is NEEN. We hope that you like it!”



******************************
CAROLINA CAYCEDO
THE PIRAEUS CENSORED FLAGS (Greek-Albanian and Greek-Turkish-Cypriot)
The failed promises of globalisation have only re-enforced differences and nationalisms, producing further borders and distances between people and territories. As Arjun Appadurai affirms in his text Modernity at Large: “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation… the role of intellectual practices is to identify the current crisis of the nation and in identifying it to provide part of the apparatus of recognition for postnational forms.” In this way, and through her work Caycedo suggests new forms of dealing with culture, identity and location. By mixing flags of the places where she originates and where she lives (Colombia/UK, Puerto Rico/Colombia), she creates banners that wave her multiple identities. Using the same method she has combined flags of different co-existing cultures or cultures in tension, creating new flags to represent them: USA-Iraq, Ireland-UK, Mexico-USA, Greek-Albanian and Greek-Turkish-Cypriot and Lebanon/Israel. The Greek-Albanian and Greek-Turkish-Cypriot were to be shown as part of the exhibition Disco Coppertonne organised by Locus Athens in the port of Piraeus, but this was not permitted by the ports military authorities.

Carolina Caycedo’s work has been exhibited internationally in important exhibitions including Da Adversidade Vivemos, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2001; the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003; J’en Reve, Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, 2005; the Whitney Biennial, New York, 2006. She’s also had solo shows at Secession, Vienna, Austria, 2002, Galeria Comercial, Puerto Rico, 2005-2006, Blow de la Barra, London, 2006 among other places.

******************************
BLOW DE LA BARRA

BLOW DE LA BARRA
Blow de la Barra exhibits proposals by artists with an international reputation who have not previously had a solo show in London while creating a new dialogue with the London scene. The gallery programme aims to examine the aesthetic issues that affect contemporary culture, including the legacy and influence of conceptual and pop art, and the relationship established between aesthetics, poetics, politics, and society. Within the context of London as an international platform, the gallery intends to create new dialogues and to mediate between other cultural and aesthetic forms and proposals that exist beyond those predominant in the contemporary art scene. The gallery’s programme consists of six exhibitions a year; it has shown the work of Stefan Brüggemann, Federico Herrero, Los Super Elegantes, Marcelo Krasilcic, Matthieu Laurette, Jo Robertson, Carolina Caycedo, Miltos Manetas, Marjetica Potrc, SUPERM (Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenny), Carla Zaccagini and Erika Verzutti among others.