The Thomas Bernard - Cortex Athletico gallery is delighted to present for the first time the work of Ignaso Aballí, with an exhibition that is made up of ten new artworks.

“[The work] of Ignasi Aballí will surprise us more than once. Because he looks to where the vision is put in doubt, where what is audible can hardly be heard, where what is fortuitous is not only mere coincidence (…) Or, as the artist says himself, where the artwork is the support for what is absent, for what needs to be looked for elsewhere (…) [This work that] was built with the profusion and excess of images and artworks that saturate a culture to which the artist keeps confronting himself (…) looks for other ways of relating to painting, to art in general. Starting from the 1990’s, Aballí’s thought process focuses on the complexity of reality – and daily life – starting from the variety of nuances that it is made up of. One could therefore consider his work as a very specific vision of questions on chance, routine, error, distance, time, absence, disappearance, invisibility, silence, emptiness, etc., questions that tell us about things that happen to everyone and that, maybe without us realising, we do every day. (…) The harmony that exists between Aballí and Perec, based on the attention to what Perec calls the infra-ordinary – of a background murmur of daily life, [appears in] (…) an investigation where humour is not incompatible with thought. (…) Behind these artworks, it is the essence itself of a research whose limits are as thin as those that exist between what we see and the invisible (…) they exist only where everything is almost visible.” Extracts from the text by Frederic Montornés, January 2015

Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. Since the 1990’s, he has exhibited namely at the Drawing Center (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Le Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse), Galerie Meessen-de Clercq (Brussels), Galerie Estrany de la Mota (Barcelona), Gagosian gallery (New York), Frac Lorraine (Metz), Centre National d’Art Contemporain Villa Arson (Nice), Fondation Maeght, (Saint-Paul de Vence), la Pinacoteca do Estado of São Paulo.

He has also participated in several international biennials such as the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007, the Sharjah Biennial in 2007 or the 11th Sydney Biennial in 1998. Ignasi Aballí received the Joan Miró prize in 2015 for his “successfully completed reflection on the limits of painting in representation, for his meticulous attention to the significant consequences that can be generated by the smallest change made in a strategy of re-giving meaning, as well as for his role as a mentor for younger artists”.

A retrospective of his work from 2005 will take place at Reina Sofía (Madrid) in 2015 and he will also have an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in 2016.