Cultivate the strange. Álvaro Perdices at the Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

This exhibition offers an anthological look at the trajectory of Álvaro Perdices (Madrid, 1971). With this purpose, a set of projects carried out from the early nineties to 2022 have been brought together, as well as others specifically conceived for La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. Finally, various installations are shown in an updated version.

Cultivating the strange alludes here to a whole range of meanings. "Cultivating" as a reference to what needs to be nurtured to grow, whether it is a field, an ideology, or oneself. "Cultivating" as a mention of landscapes, nature, and peripheral botany, which mean so much in Perdices' work. "Cultivating" as a tribute to the book Cultivos (2008) by the writer and editor Julián Rodríguez, a fundamental figure in the artist's evolution.

On the other hand, what is "strange" understood from the perspective that associates it with queer and even uncanny elements, according to the famous exhibition series by Mike Kelley ? another of his references ? as there is a distortion, a search for indecipherable zones that destabilize what is normative and turn it obsolete or alienating, to which Álvaro Perdices has dedicated quite a bit of sowing and sustainability work.

His own creative journey is an example. Starting in 1993, he settled in Los Angeles, where he pursued graduate studies at UCLA and worked as a teacher at Twentieth Street Elementary School. During these years, he came into contact with some of the most relevant authors of the nineties Los Angeles scene, such as Kelley, previously mentioned, Paul McCarthy, or Lari Pittman. In 2011, he returned to Madrid and began working as a curator and exhibition coordinator for the Museo del Prado.

This apparent dialectic between, let's say, the underground and erudition constitutes the basis of his projects, which often "address" certain dissent from microhistorical operations and gestures, or "read" art history by freeing it from any academicism, as if it were a kind of long missive with many addressees, a letter drafted, at the same time, by Velázquez and Kenneth Anger, Cornelis van Poelenburgh and Andy Warhol.

Álvaro Perdices has been a pioneer in opposing human action and its replica at the expense of a nature that warns us of the dangers of progress through ecological anarchy. He also explored, thirty years ago, free education, collaborations with children in formative periods, the tools that they can build themselves in the face of coercive pedagogical models.

The exhibition ends with the proposal Forms of the future (2025), which reprises the rehearsals directed in 1936 by Pura Maortua and Federico García Lorca of the latter's play titled Así que pasen cinco años (1931), along with the ceramic designs by Maruja Mallo, which disappeared during the bombings of the Civil War. Both truncated projects return today to the halls of La Virreina to be inscribed in a pending completion restitution.

It can be visited for free from Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 11 am to 8 pm.