Under 35

On 26 May, as part of PHotoEspaña’s Off festival, Ivorypress presented the group exhibition Under 35, which brings together the work of five young Spanish photographers: Laia Abril, Alberto Lizaralde, Javier Marquerie Thomas, Óscar Monzón and Jordi Ruiz Cirera.

The overarching element of the works on show in this exhibition is the curiosity and inquisitiveness of these photographers. Laia Abril’s project The Epilogue documents the grieving process of the Robinson family after losing their daughter Cammy to bulimia. Abril reconstructs her life through family snapshots, objects and documents and offers a different point of view of bulimia, showing the different issues and conflicts Cammy struggled with thoughout her life and their effect on the indirect victims of this disease. Everything will be ok, by Alberto Lizaralde, is a reflective project produced throughout the course of five years, after an emotional breakdown. The series has a narrative structure in three acts, halfway between fiction and reality. Javier Marquerie Thomas takes a historical approach in Los Barros del Monje, in which he returns to 1937 to revisit the Battle of Brunete from his family’s country estate, where it took place. The photographs, which show a landscape bursting with ammunition and shrapnel, create a narrative in which, alongside his family, Marquerie confronts the landscape, the ammunition found in it and the stars that unite them to the soldiers in order to construct a tale about the war, despite not having lived through it. With Karma, a project produced between 2009 and 2013, Oscar Monzón uses cars as a metaphor for humankind, studying the attitudes and behaviours of people through their cars. It’s a strong work that shows a social and aesthetic evolution motivated by the human desire to achieve the perfection of a machine. In the work The United Soya Republic, Jordi Ruiz Cirera documents, in an intersectional way, the changes in the landscape and socioeconomic fabric that the agricultural export model is producing in Paraguay, currently the world’s fourth largest soy exporter, a million-dollar transnational industry.

Images: © Pablo Gómez-Ogando. Courtesy Ivorypress