Elizabeth Aro. Otro en el espejo

Among the most significant collective exhibitions featuring the artist's work, there is the temporary exhibition held in the Museo Reina Sofía in 1991 entitled La Escuela del Sur. El taller de Torres García (The School from the South. The Studio of Torres García and his Legacy) (Link to exhibition), which also finds a home in the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery (Texas), the Museo Monterrey (Mexico), the Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City) and The Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York).

This time around, Aro highlights the idea of alterity through the consideration of the existence of other faces, customs and languages. The exhibition is divided into two, one part expressing light, the other darkness; thus it focuses on the dialogue between two complementary installations.

In the first space, the artist realises sculptural pieces in line with previous works and presents here a large ball of felt, with a diameter of around 2.5 metres, that hangs from the ceiling. This huge ball represents the world - the skin of the earth in a world that falls towards the south and progressively loses order and splits apart; a world which is welcoming, but at the same time a place where clearly not everybody fits.

In the second, the viewers find themselves in darkness; the blacks of the walls dominate and contrast with the colour photographs of strikingly illuminated bodies. These bodies are foreshortened, isolated figures of men and women with different gestures and poses and with sharp contours. Although they are contemporary, their poses and expressions evoke figures from classical painting - apostles or angels.

Aro uses the essential qualities of painting, but expresses them with a language likened to the structure of video or organised around photography. Between the painting of the baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Bill Viola's videos, these images engulf the viewer and converse from a contemporary location as they deal with sentiments and universal situations.