Hybrid Art Fair, March 7 – 10, 2024 – Madrid (SP)
The Hybrid Art Fair is a special kind of art-fair, organized in a hotel in the centre of Madrid. It expects galleries and platforms to present their artists in a hotel room. Earlier, in 2022, EX-MÊKH interpreted the rooms in which Hybrid took place as neutral spaces which you make your own and which you leave later. We saw the rituals that belonged with it as a theatrical play and the passing audience as temporal appearances which take their own part in the play as artists. This second time that we took part in the Spanish Art Fair we focussed on the part we play: we decorate the room with our work, but where is it from? Who exactly is our persona in this situation? What is the function of the props in the play which is played by everyone?
The entrance to our room had shirts by Ellen Rodenberg on show. Entering past Ellen’s work one would notice the bed with Flowerfoots by Maarten Schepers and Kees Koomen’s textwork above the bed that said Her spine moved like a snake
In Arte Ventura Maarten had been experimenting with clay and orange peels. He continued working on that in Holland and some results he showed in room 217.
The photographs are from Holland. They look like paintings, because the sensor could not catch the light of the full moon in the fur-trees. They give the room a homely atmosphere. Above it all a drawing by Ellen Rodenberg: Sois belle et tais-toi.
right: You are right, you have a good point there
Kees Koomen took his project New Encounters to Madrid. On walks to the malieveld in Den Haag he notices people that stand out for him. At the Malieveld he writes about them and mails the text to his studio. When in the Studio he makes sketches in oilpaint on stone paper and writes some remark in them with color-pencil. The artist shows them in Madrid as a homage to Francisco Goya for whom he has a lifelong admiration. He accompanies his work with text in the sketches and also behind the work as Goya used to do in a very poetic way.
Ellen Rodenberg produced a number of shirts which she painted on in her expressive way.
She took hold of the bathroom in which she showed new work from her residency in Arte Ventura and after. It goes under the name Characters! During the fair she worked in the bathroom off and on. Ellen would put visiting children to work also and played games with them. Visitors liked to discuss the work with her.
