Salón Salvaje is the first individual exhibition of Yolanda Tabanera in Barcelona, city with which she has strong ties. The Catalan connection is related to her taste for the emotional outbust of the rauxa, Modernism’s ornamental exuberance, and her friendship with artists such as Evru/Zush. Glass, present in most of the pieces on display, was produced during many years in the now-disappeared Fábrica La Verneda in Rubí, and documents her artesanal link to a workers’ alchemical realm, practically unimaginable today.
In this exhibition, the artist contructs images and objects, which are located in a hybrid and metaphorical space between organism and ornament, and which culminate in a series of precious objects configuring a personal liturgy. Her intention is to show the dicotomy between the fantastic, the primative, the profound, the surrealist, the dreamy, the magical, and salon high culture.
“Yolanda Tabanera’s works transport us to strange worlds, inhabited by mythical and ancestral beings, which reveal the force of irrationality and of the human unconscious, as well as bringing to mind remote cultures and periods, which form part of the legacy of a millenial and universal civilisation.”
Genara Sert Arnús
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Yolanda Tabanera was born in Madrid in 1965. She studied Literature and Fine Arts in Madrid and Munich, and graduated from the Kunstakademie in Munich in 1992.
Her work is highly introspective, centred in a visionary investigation of an interior space which, when exteriorised, is converted into a personal language. The artist approaches, in a subtle and metaphorical manner, themes that are profoundly important in human existence, such as fragility and the transcendence of the human body, its grandeur and its mortality. Yolanda Tabanera conceptualises the development of her objectual poetics through a creative process which flows from the drawing to the object to the installation. Essential in this process is the work with very diverse materials connected through artisanal techniques and processes, from ceramics, esparto and glass to leather and precious metalwork. Tabanera explores the expressivity and the power of these materials, endowing them with a singular life, approximating the aura of liturgical and ritual objects.
