Tijeras en los ojos. Patricia Gadea

Twenty years after her death, this exhibition recovers the work of Patricia Gadea, marked by an incisive reflection on her own time. Gadea was not a painter of autonomous or closed forms, but of materials in transit. She worked with everything that fell into her hands, activating a critical thinking based on a disobedient use of the visual. As Francisco Calvo Serraller wrote, “rather than applying cut and paste, it seems she has scissors in her eyes”. It is not only a matter of technique, but of a way of looking.

Situated in the context of Madrid postmodern painting, Patricia Gadea developed an eclectic practice of strong colorism, traversed by collage and by references to pop culture. Her work, from the beginning, is inscribed in the context of the Movida, a moment marked by the hybridization of languages and the dissolution of hierarchies. With the process of democratic change in Spain, her work acts as a critical device that challenges the dominant imaginaries of the time from a conscious and provocative position. Gadea assimilates these influences in order to question them. Her eclectic iconography gives rise to a beautiful chaos that overflows the limits between abstraction and figuration.