“As a woman artist, I don’t need any tamer; the whip is now in the hands of destiny. I’m not a clown broken not one featured “Climbing on an elephant: I am Patricia Gadea caressing a black panther, which is art, although it may bite me.”
This is what Gadea (Madrid, 1960 – Palencia, 2006) wrote after her participation in ARCO 1993. And perhaps yes, art ended up biting the hand of this painter brilliant and damnwhose canvases reflect the dirty mirror of the wild.
Daughter of the Madrid scenefrom the eighties and postpunk, from that effervescent and unbridled Spain in full transition, he settled in New York with Juan Ugalde thanks to a Fulbright scholarship.
His stay there, in the last five years of the eighties, was a turning point in his career. in the city founded the Estrujenbank collective, together with Ugalde himself and the poet Dionisio Cañas, a project that brought with it a politicization of his language that he would never abandon.
She had no hair on her brushes, Gadea, honest and excessive to rage. She was already talking about politics, feminism and child violence. Everything fit on his canvases: circus posters, landscapes cut out of paintings from the Rastro, sinister children’s dolls, comics. undergroundreligious imagery, Mortadelos and Filemones, enraged octopuses, delirious collages… but always with the minute detail of a very sane narrative.
Patricia Gadea: ‘Untitled’ (from the series ‘Circo’), 1992. Photo: Roberto Ruiz / Maisterravalbuena, Madrid
Their references were almost endless. They say that he devoured all types of magazines, exhibitions, or advertising posters with his eyes. Everything aroused his curiosity, everything could become material for his art. Gadea echoes Goya, Pollock, Warhol, Dalí, but also cocido, neighborhood and graffiti. High and low culture on canvas capable of bringing us a tear and a laugh at the same time.
Now we have the opportunity to meet her again at the Maisterravalbuena gallery, which has been guarding her legacy for a year and opens the season with an individual titled ¡Bum!. The name suits him like no other: that onomatopoeia was a recurring resource in his work, especially in the series Circuspresent in the sample.
Patricia Gadea resonates with Goya, Pollock, Warhol and Dalí, but also with stew, neighborhood and graffiti
It all began when he first ripped out circus posters from the streets of San Sebastián to develop an allegory of the Spanish political and historical moment: a circus emerged populated by clowns with terrible faces, looks lost between anger and tension. Gadea unmasks the system using precisely the mask, as an exorcism of his own disenchantment.
Between the grotesque and the sinister, the naive and the popGadea renewed the artistic imagination of her generation and reflected on power, capitalism and female discrimination. Her death from an overdose overshadowed a dazzling painting that, in the 2000s, was relegated to the background while she fell on hard times in Palencia, trying – unsuccessfully – to detoxify from heroin.
Patricia Gadea: ‘The Queen’s Paw’, 1992. Photo: Roberto Ruiz / Maisterravalbuena, Madrid
Francisco Calvo Serraller wrote that he had “scissors in the eyes”, alluding to his disruptive way of exceeding limits and composing collagescutting only the essentials.