BARCELONA.- In her work, the artist Marria Pratts (Barcelona, 1988) takes apart the stereotypes of urban life, opening a path amidst the decadence of a decaying world to salvage its beauty. Her creative impulse is drawn from immediate content and developed through action. In her projects, discourses that are critical, irreverent and clamorous come into contact, with a hopeful gaze that is expressed through the use of colour and her spontaneous style. Pratts has an uninhibited way of overcoming creative rigidity, while safeguarding her own unique way of doing things.

According to Pere Llobera, the exhibition curator, in her projects Pratts refers us to the exalted atmosphere that predominated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in what proved to be a trying time that likewise brought with it new means of culture practice. Just like the youth of that time, Pratts too belongs to a generation on the edge that expresses itself in radical ways.

For Dive and Immersion, Marria Pratts presents 1 possession Drift, a project that goes beyond her pictorial practice with an installation that intervenes decisively in Espai 13. In collaboration with the architect Jorge Vidal, Pratts has designed an architecture that she uses to fully modify the underground gallery of the Fundació Joan Miró, opening up new routes within it. This installed artifact creates different layouts in the space that allow the visitor to get closer to the most fully concealed sites of Pratts’s artistic obsessions.

Beauty does not seek to control. Or to be controlled.
Ancestral fire by contagion will be a new path.
How far can a landscape be evoked?
The fire overflows with ashes.
The painting will keep the secrets.
---Marria Pratts

Drawings and painting are included in this structure reflecting on her personal iconography. Various sculptures made of neon-filled glass run through the installation’s varies set of features, illuminating them along its path. As Llobera observes: “Everything she activates in the present becomes a potential piece for the immediate future . . . It seems like everything feeds her, that she is ready to accept everything, remaining indifferent to nothing. We might ask if the art emerging from Marria is all told what comes from a personality that effectively outdoes itself in each action of her life, metabolizing itself into expression.” Marria Pratts (Barcelona, 1988) is a self taught painter. Her work conveys a decaying world in which all mistakes are welcome to embrace a New Dream. She has had solo exhibitions at Ruttkowski 68 (Germany, 2022), Everyday Gallery (Brussels, 2021) and SADE Gallery (Los Angeles, 2019), and has participated in group exhibitions at MACBA, with the work I Hear Music In My Head (Transformation of a Blurred Thought); at Tecla Sala (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 2021), and at Costa Mesa Conceptual Art Center (Los Angeles, 2020). His work was part of the exhibition Punk. Its traces in contemporary art, which was presented at CA2M (Madrid), MACBA (Barcelona) and Artium (Vitoria) between 2015 and 2016. He is currently preparing an exhibition with BibiGallery that will take place in New York at the end of 2022.

Dive and Immersion is the series of exhibitions the Fundació Joan Miró is putting on at Espai 13 throughout 2022, with support from the Banco Sabadell Foundation. Curated by Pere Llobera (Barcelona, 1970), the project surveys the state of the art of painting over the course of four exhibitions by artists from the local scene employing a wide range of the many languages used in our context. The shows by Victor Jaenada, Marcel Rubio Juliana, Marria Pratts and Martín Vitaliti showcase the tremendous possibilities afforded by the notion of expanded painting in conjunction with methodologies and research from the world of emerging art. The series takes its name from Galician poet José Ángel Valente’s free translation of the title of the poem “Il tuffatore”, by Italian writer and Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale, rendered in Spanish as “Salto e inmersión”. Montale was inspired by a fresco from a 5th-century BC tomb depicting a naked young man diving headfirst into a pool of water. Both painting and poem explore ideas of life, death and the circularity that binds them together. Jaenada, Rubio Juliana, Pratts and Vitaliti thread these same concepts through their own projects in a tragic and lucid vein. In their installations, artefacts and paintings, all four artists—dubbed “natural painters” by Pere Llobera—address the need to find their own voice in this cyclical succession. The title of the series also hints symbolically at these artists’ deeply felt, radical commitment to their work.