Cultivating the Uncanny

Álvaro Perdices

This exhibition surveys the career of Álvaro Perdices (Madrid, 1971), presenting a selection of the artist’s projects spanning the period from the first half of the 1990s to 2022, others created specifically for La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, and lastly, various installations shown in an updated version.

Cultivating the Uncanny alludes here to a melting pot of meanings. Cultivating as a reference to that which needs to be fed in order to grow, be it a crop, an ideology or oneself. Cultivating as a mention of landscapes, nature and botany on the outskirts, which signify so much in Perdices’ work. Cultivating as a tribute to the book Cultivos (2008, Crops) by the writer and editor Julián Rodríguez, a fundamental figure in the artist’s development.

And the uncanny, understood here on the basis of that definition that associates it with the queer and even the strange, in keeping with the famous exhibition series by Mike Kelley—another of Perdices’ referents—as there is a distortion, a search for those indecipherable zones that destabilise the normative and make it obsolete or alienating, zones to which Perdices dedicated no small effort to sowing and sustaining.

Perdices’ own creative itinerary is an example of this. In 1993, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at postgraduate level at UCLA and was a teacher at Twentieth Street Elementary School. During these years, he came into contact with some of the leading artists on the LA scene in the 1990s, among them Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Lari Pittman. In 2011, he returned to Madrid and began to work as an exhibition curator and coordinator for the Prado.

This apparent dialectic between, let us say, the underground and erudition lies at the basis of his works, which often “address” certain forms of dissidence through micro-historical operations and gestures, or which “read” the history of art while freeing it from any academicism, as if it were a kind of long missive with multiple senders, a letter written by Velázquez and Kenneth Anger, Cornelis van Poelenburgh and Andy Warhol at the same time.

Perdices has been a pioneer in opposing human action and the response to it by a nature that warns us through ecological anarchy of the dangers of progress. In addition, thirty years ago he explored free education, cooperative approaches with children in their formative years and the tools they themselves can make in the face of coercive pedagogical models.

The exhibition closes with Forms of the Future (2025), which revisits the rehearsals directed in 1936 by Pura Maortua and Federico García Lorca of Lorca’s play Así que pasen cinco años (1931, When Five Years Pass), together with ceramic designs by Maruja Mallo that disappeared during bombardments in the Spanish Civil War. These two projects cut short return today to the exhibition rooms of La Virreina as part of a restitution that is still awaiting completion.