Lectura Fragmentada

29 / 10 / 2013

On 29 October Ivorypress will present the artist’s book Lectura Fragmentada, created by Cuban artist Glenda León in collaboration with Kreëmart and Ivorypress.

Lectura Fragmentada is a numbered work created by intervening in copies of the first series of C International Photo Magazine, a photography magazine published by Ivorypress between 2005 and 2010. The artist transforms this publication by cutting a triangular slice from each volume, as if it were a cake, and served onto a plate. This work evokes a passion and an appetite for books and at the same time brings to the fore the way in which we sometimes focus only on certain parts of a book: paragraphs, passages, pages…

‘Sometimes we only recall a small section of a book, be it a good sentence, a concept or a sensation that we receive from it’ and it is this metaphor that is central to the work. In the words of the artist, ‘when you think about it, it is rarely the book in its totality that is remembered—the word-for-word memorisation of its content—but rather, a fragment of the book that stays with us.’

There are two different versions of Glenda León’s Lectura Fragmentada. The first is an edition of two and one artist’s proof, composed of each of the two volumes of the first series of C Photo, presented individually with a slice of the book cut out and placed on a plate, both elements contained within a plastic cake caddy. The second version is a single edition that comprises whole cake made up of ten portions that correspond to each of the ten volumes of C Photo, presented on a glass cake stand covered by a dome.

Glenda León (Havana, 1976) is a visual artist who lives and works between Madrid and Havana. She uses various techniques in her artistic creations, from drawing to video art as well as installations, objects and photography. Through her work she seeks the space between the visible and the invisible, sound and silence, the ephemeral and the eternal. Her collaboration with Kreëmart and Ivorypress has been developed in this vein, after León participated as guest artist in Kreëmart’s first art happening in Spain on 21 September as part of the event APERTURA 2013.

Kreëmart is a project that intends to remove artists from their usual creative process and invites them to work with a new artistic technique: dessert. In collaboration with different chefs, artists are invited to produce a dessert that is distributed, as a numbered work, in their art happenings. The underlying idea to this form of creativity is to express that art can be both playful and nutritious, like a dessert. In these events, the audience interacts with the creators and the artwork in a spontaneous way. Apart from Glenda León, other artists have participated in this project, such as Marina Abramović, Maurizio Cattelan, Olaf Breuning or Los Carpinteros. As a parallel activity, the Kreëmart Salons challenge people who work in the art world to consider controversial issues related to art and to discuss them openly with the audience.


Date and time: 29 October 2013 at 7:30 p.m.
Venue: Ivorypress Space c/ Comandante Zorita, 46, Madrid
​RSVP: opening@ivorypress.com – Spots are limited

​With the collaboration of Absolut and Magasand