Elena Galarza
DEC, 21, 2024 - FEB, 1, 2025
What do we remember from our childhood? How do we build the memories of our childhood? What is real and what is imagined in those memories? Are we evoking concrete experiences or just the sensations and emotions associated with these experiences? This is one possible starting point to explore the work of Elena Galarza (La Laguna, 1966), an artist who picks at the seams of memory to return to the dreams, games and stories of childhood.
In a clear exercise of self-referentiality, with patience and depth, slowly and without haste, Galarza deploys in her drawings and paintings a personal imagery that over the years has become increasingly complex. Her inspiration comes from within, from an intricate inner world from which springs a prolific imaginary that allows her to render the invisible visible.
The apparent playful aspect of her works encourages the viewer to develop interpretations, to seek order and narration where there is neither order nor narration, nor hierarchies. Her compositions are enigmatic, strange, with a strong symbolic charge, without narrative structure, bringing together disparate elements, objects and figures that coexist and share their simultaneity.
In her drawings and paintings, time stands still, frozen, which the artist turns into an infinite past on which fragments of childhood are folded over. Through her work with memory, she restores images in which she combines experiences lived with those remembered, but also imagination and evocation as ways of knowing herself and others. And it is the footprints of childhood that, step by step, lead Elena Galarza to a primitive place where she can seek the origin of the creative impulse or perhaps the germ from which dreams and memories are made.
Yolanda Peralta
It is very gratifying that, after more than a decade’s absence from the world of island art where she was a favourite artist and which is one of her most unique sensitivities, Elena Galarza is once again showing her work at Galería Artizar. A distance that has been geographical (she has lived in Germany since 2012) and professional (the most recent news of her work was that of 12 small drawings included in Anelio Rodríguez’s book Historia del Mundo Ilustrada, published in 2010), beating beneath other existential imperatives. Despite this, it will be a ritual of intimacy that, although inconstant, was always there and which in recent years has intensified in its exercise.
I like to think that it was more than just coincidence that, after ten years of not hearing from each other, one day in June 2022 I decided to send Elena a WhatsApp to see how she was, just at a time when she had apparently returned to drawing with a kind of intensity. Even so, it was not easy to overcome certain apprehensions after such a long absence, feeling a great sense of responsibility for her work along with doubts and insecurities about returning to a social and cultural role she had forgotten, although admittedly she had never placed much store by it.
The frequent contact, conversations and occasional encounters that followed gradually evolved and matured the exhibition project that is now a reality in Artizar, which sees a secret longing fulfilled. Therefore, it is logical that we would welcome the return of her work to the walls of the gallery, which she has accompanied throughout her two life stories, and say: welcome back, Elena.
Carlos E. Pinto / Galería Artizar
Born in La Laguna in 1966, Elena Galarza completed the studies she had begun in 1984 at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of La Laguna in 1989 and that same year began showing her work in some collective exhibitions. The following year, she presented her first solo exhibition at the Galería Parámetro in Santa Cruz. In 1991, she also had a solo exhibition in the Ateneo de la Laguna and in the Sala de Arte y Cultura de la Caja de Ahorros in the same city, both organised by Gonzalo Díaz, of Sala Conca, where she also exhibited in collective shows, as well as in Galería Artizar. In 1992, she was the only female representative in the exhibition A natural history, curated by Antonio Zaya, and for the APE Gallery in New York, at an exhibition coinciding with an institutional project that presented Canary art to American audiences: From the Volcano, curated by Fernando Castro and promoted by the Government of the Canary Islands. A few days after arriving in New York, Elena Galarza became seriously ill, had to be repatriated urgently and spent several weeks in a coma in a hospital in the capital of Santa Cruz.
From 1993 onwards, she abandoned painting and focused almost exclusively on drawing. She exhibited her first drawings that same year at the Galería Saro León in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, at her fourth solo exhibition. In 1994, she inaugurated the Kings and Poet exhibition at Galería Artizar, with drawings and collages. That year, she was awarded the Mont Blanc Prize for Culture in the Canary Islands, and the prize money allowed her to fulfil a long-held desire to study and research the work of Paul Klee, which took her after the summer to the Paul Klee Foundation in Bern, where she lived for two months. She then moved to Geneva where, thanks to a grant from the Tenerife Island Council and the work she did, she remained until the end of 1997. During these years, she expanded her lithographic studies at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and attended a course on binding, which materialised in the book El cielo precipitado (Geneva, 1997) with 8 lithographs by Elena Galarza and 7 poems by Rafael Alberti from the book Concerning the Angels.
In 1996, her work was included in the exhibition Red Crown, curated by Francisco Rivas for the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Gran Canaria.
Back on the island, in 1997 she contributed pieces created in Switzerland to the exhibition World, Magic, Memory, curated by Carlos E. Pinto and promoted by La Laguna Council as part of the activities to mark the V Centenary. She also took part in Metamorphic Memories, in the Parpalló room of Valencia’s Provincial Council, together with Pep Durán, Antón Patiño, etc. In the year 2000, she participated in the exhibition Convergences/Divergencies (CAAM) and in various collective exhibitions, and in 2001 she presented Sketch Book as part of the dual exhibition she put on with Ángel Padrón in Galería Artizar. In 2004, she exhibited at the VI Dakar Biennale in a project curated by Celestino Hernández with the title Island paths.
Half way through 2009, Antonio Salgado Perez published an admirable article in El Día about Galarza’s caricatures, a line of work she had been practising in the previous years to fill in for her father, the watercolour artist Juan Galarza, in his regular contributions to the newspaper La Opinión de Tenerife. At the end of that year, she participated in the exhibition Toy Shop, at Galería Artizar, the last time she exhibited her work. In the spring of 2012, Elena Galarza moved to Germany, where she has lived ever since, practising various professions and keeping her distance from the art world, until now. In addition to some of the names mentioned above, her work has been discussed by Emmanuel Guigon, Andrés Sanchez Robayna, Jonathan Allen, Clara Muñoz, Orlando Betancor, Francisco Lezcano and Elica Ramos.
