This project originates from the time spent by Emma Brasó (Madrid, 1983) at the CCA Glasgow on a curatorial fellowship awarded by curating.info. After five months of research, the Congost & Coombes exhibition project stemming from her period of residency was approved.
Glasgow has become a major attraction for British and foreign visual artists in recent years thanks to the prestige currently enjoyed by the Glasgow School of Arts (GSA) and the fact that a good many of its graduates have been nominated for the Turner Prize. What is more, owing to its still affordable housing prices and the support of local institutions – including Tramway, the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Sculpture Studios and the CCA itself – the city now ranks second after London in the number of visual artists living there.
In 1996 the curator Manel Clot included a young Carles Congost (Olot, 1970) among the artists featured in his Spaces of Desire exhibition at Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery, which is well known as it is an initiative – still running – set up by graduates from the GSA. Nearly two decades on, and having come a long way since then, the time seems right to take Congost’s work back to Glasgow again.
The Congost & Coombes project is aimed at furthering knowledge of Congost’s work and at the same time relating it to that of a local artist, Henry Coombes (UK, 1977), as the two men share a number of interests despite not knowing each other. Both have worked on video from a narrative approach in order to deal with certain conventions relating to the art world and have done so with humour and melancholy and borrowing references from cinema and pop culture. The possibility of seeing their work jointly will mutually enhance its understanding and help create a desirable tension between their points of view.
Glasgow has become a major attraction for British and foreign visual artists in recent years thanks to the prestige currently enjoyed by the Glasgow School of Arts (GSA) and the fact that a good many of its graduates have been nominated for the Turner Prize. What is more, owing to its still affordable housing prices and the support of local institutions – including Tramway, the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Sculpture Studios and the CCA itself – the city now ranks second after London in the number of visual artists living there.
In 1996 the curator Manel Clot included a young Carles Congost (Olot, 1970) among the artists featured in his Spaces of Desire exhibition at Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery, which is well known as it is an initiative – still running – set up by graduates from the GSA. Nearly two decades on, and having come a long way since then, the time seems right to take Congost’s work back to Glasgow again.
The Congost & Coombes project is aimed at furthering knowledge of Congost’s work and at the same time relating it to that of a local artist, Henry Coombes (UK, 1977), as the two men share a number of interests despite not knowing each other. Both have worked on video from a narrative approach in order to deal with certain conventions relating to the art world and have done so with humour and melancholy and borrowing references from cinema and pop culture. The possibility of seeing their work jointly will mutually enhance its understanding and help create a desirable tension between their points of view.